一
1—Being a man has always been dangerous.
2—There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men.
3—But the great universal of male mortality is being changed.
4—Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do.
5—This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate.
6—More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed.
7—Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death.
8—Today it makes almost no difference.
9—Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.
译文：
身为男性总是危险的。新生儿男女比例约为105：100，但到了成年期，这一比例下降到几乎持平，在70岁的老年人中，女性人数则是男性的两倍。但是男性死亡率高这一普遍情形正在发生改变。如今，男婴存活率几乎同女婴一样高。这意味着到了男孩寻找伴侣的关键年龄，将首次出现男孩过剩现象。更重要的是，自然选择的另一次机会也已不复存在。50年前，婴儿（尤其是男婴）的存活机率取决于其体重。轻一公斤或重一公斤几乎意味着必死无疑。现在，体重几乎不起什么作用。因为婴儿体重差异很多情形下源于基因，所以又一个进化动因消失了。
二
1—There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children.
2—Few people are as fertile as in the past.
3—Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children.
4—Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average.
5—Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring.
6—Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished.
7—India shows what is happening.
8—The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples.
9—The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
译文：
进化自杀还有另一种方法：活得更久，但少生孩子。现在，很少有人像过去那样具有旺盛的生育力。除了在一些宗教社群中，几乎没有女性能够生育15个孩子。如今生育的人数同死亡的年龄一样，已趋于平均化。我们多数人的子女数大致相同。又一次，人与人之间的差异和利用这种差异进行自然选择的机会都削弱了。印度的状况可以说明正在发生的一切。这个国家为大城市里的少数人提供财富，而给予其余的各部落民族以贫困。今天这种大规模的均一化一—每个人在存活机率和子女数量方面都相同——意味着与部落相比，自然选择在印度中上阶层已经失去了80%的效能。
三
1—For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived.
2—Strangely, it has involved little physical change.
3—No other species fills so many places in nature.
4—But in the past 100, 000 years-even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not.
5—We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us.
6—Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they “look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension.”
7—No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness.
8—But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
译文：
对我们来说，这意味着进化已经结束；生物乌托邦已经来临。奇怪的是，这一过程几乎没有牵涉到人身体上的变化。在自然界没有其他哪种物种遍布如此多的地方。但在过去的10万年——甚至过去的100年中，我们的生活发生了变化，而我们的身体却没有改变。我们的确没有进化，因为机器和社会代替我们进化了。达尔文曾用一句话来描述那些对进化一无所知的人：他们“看有机生命体如同野人看船，好像看着某种完全超出其理解力的东西”。毫无疑问，我们在回顾20世纪的生活方式时，会因其丑陋不堪而无法理解。但是，不管我们的子孙后代有多么惊讶于乌托邦对我们的遥不可及，他们的模样与我们是一样的。
