正确的笔记打开方式

精细消化型（推荐）

1.阅读原文3次以上，猜测生词和句意，标注难句难词

2.查阅字典、做笔记

3.复读2遍，重点圈出长难句

4.对比两份笔记并思考总结

5.课后复习巩固知识点和词汇

速食型

1.每日查看1-2段原文+笔记

2.记录重要知识点

3.复习和巩固

导读

此篇文章是关于Wrangham的新书《善良的悖论：人类进化中道德与暴力之间的奇怪关系》，讨论人类的进化史、道德的形成、政府的诞生。原文选自New Yorker，搜索文章标题即可查看原文。文章难度较大。译文仅供参考。

外刊原文：

<NEW YORKER>Did Capital Punishment Create Morality?（下）

The types of aggression constitute one building block of Wrangham’s theory of moral origins. An equally important element of that theory is domestication, which turns out to be a crucial category for interpreting the human evolutionary past. For a long time, no theory of human domestication was thought to be necessary, even by Darwin, on the apparently self-evident ground that domestication requires someone to direct the process, like the breeder. Obviously, no one had done that to humans.

But while breeding, or artificial selection, requires an external agent, natural selection does not. If selection pressures work against aggressiveness, animals will self-domesticate. That humans have self-domesticated has grown increasingly obvious over the past half century. Even apart from increased docility—the primary index of domestication—humans show many signs of what has come to be recognized as the domestication syndrome: smaller bodies and brains, thinner bones, shorter faces, and reduced physical differences between males and females. Besides these anatomical markers, there are also behavioral and physiological ones, which involve fear response, playfulness, learning rates, sexual behavior, and hormone production, among others.

What these markers all have in common is paedomorphism (literally, “child shape”). In dogs, foxes, guinea pigs, and many other species, domesticated animals resemble the juvenile stage of the wild animals that they descended from. Humans evolved from our Homo ancestor several hundred thousand years ago, and there aren’t sufficient fossils to demonstrate paedomorphism directly. But there are plenty of Neanderthal fossils, and comparisons strongly suggest that present-day humans are, in many respects, juvenilized—that is, domesticated—versions of our remote ancestors.

Why did these changes happen? For an evolutionary biologist, that question is normally equivalent to asking, What adaptive purpose did they serve? In this case, however, the answer is unusual: none. A decades-long, painstaking experiment by two Russian geneticists working in Siberia showed that reduced brain size, thinner bones, and all of the other markers of domestication syndrome are merely incidental byproducts of a primary adaptation: reduced reactive aggression. In organisms selecting against such aggression, the migration of neural-crest cells—a special kind of cell that carries developmental instructions throughout the embryo and fetus—is delayed, resulting in smaller bodies, smaller brains, hormonal changes, and the rest.

Studies have been fairly clear on this. What has been unclear is why human communities selected against reactive aggression. For Wrangham, the answer is that group life requires a minimum of stability. No trait is more disruptive than reactive aggression, which fuels such behaviors as quests for dominance and demands for submission; arrogance, bullying, and random violence; and the monopolizing of food and females. That is a behavioral profile of the alpha male, the arch-reactive aggressor. Communities must either endure such pests or eliminate them. Once humans could communicate (the origin of language can’t be further narrowed down than three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand years ago, but empathy or “shared intentionality” appears to be independent of language and might be sufficient for communication), the die was cast. The origin of domestication, Wrangham proposes, was the group execution of alpha males. Civilization is founded on capital punishment—or, to give it its anthropological name, “coalitionary proactive aggression.”

The executioners were adult males, usually married. (One of alpha males’ most salient offenses was commandeering other men’s wives.) Over time, as alpha individuals were regularly killed and the gene for reactive aggression became less frequent in a population, the coalition of executioners became more stable. Their power was, in effect, absolute—anticipating Max Weber’s famous definition of the state: the agency with a recognized “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” Staying on the right side of these executioners came to seem a matter of life and death (by murder or—what often amounted to the same thing—ostracism). Community members would have welcomed rules that told them which behaviors were dangerous. They would also have cultivated a reputation for beneficence, since antisocial behavior was the original sin. These developments may have given rise to two of the most distinctive features of human morality: our orientation to abstract standards of right and wrong, and our much greater degree of prosociality—altruism, coöperation, fairness, etc.—than is found in other primates.

By making us reflect on the rightness of our actions, capital punishment gave birth to virtue. But in replacing the limited power of the alpha male with the unlimited power of executioners and eventually of the state, Wrangham writes, “coalitionary proactive aggression is responsible for execution, war, massacre, slavery, hazing, ritual sacrifice, torture, lynchings, gang wars, political purges, and similar abuses of power.” That is the book’s constitutive paradox. Planned, coördinated violence gave us a social order that made virtue adaptive. But that social order also made exploitation and oppression possible, either by the state or by favored or powerful subgroups. We are, Wrangham concludes, “the best and worst of species.”

Wrangham is anxious not to be misunderstood. There is apparently a Rousseauist faction of social scientists who resist the idea that any violent tendency is inherited, on the ground that militarists will then dismiss all demands for peace as against nature, or that male violence against women will be excused as “natural.” This is a perennial objection to one or another aspect of evolutionary theory: it has no business being true, so it isn’t. But such objections greatly overestimate the political importance of what we believe about evolution, and indeed of ideology in general. It may never be known precisely how genes and culture interact to determine any complex behavior. But enough is known to vindicate the common-sense intuition that both matter. Our genes are not our doom.

Whether or not Wrangham is right—and no theory this complex and ambitious is ever more than partly right—there is something impressive, even moving, about the book’s sifting, weighing, and fitting together of evidence from a half-dozen continents, a dozen disciplines, several dozen species, and two million years into a large and intricate structure. There is also a lesson: evolution is much less relevant to our growth than moral imagination. “History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential,” Wrangham protests. We shouldn’t assume that human nature makes progress toward equality and peace either impossible or inevitable. It’s neither; it’s just damned hard.

George Scialabba is the author of, most recently, “Slouching Toward Utopia.”

精读笔记：

Did Capital Punishment Create Morality?（下）

The types of aggression constitute one building block of Wrangham’s theory of moral origins. An equally important element of that theory is domestication, which turns out to be a crucial category for interpreting the human evolutionary past. For a long time, no theory of human domestication was thought to be necessary, even by Darwin, on the apparently self-evident ground that domestication requires someone to direct the process, like the breeder. Obviously, no one had done that to humans.

单词讲解：

constitute:组成

Building block: building(建筑)+ block(砖头) = 组成部分；构成要素

Constitute one building block of...：是...的构成要素   （写作词汇）

domestication:驯化

ground:原因

通常ground作为原因是复数使用的，on the grounds that...为了核实我也查询了多个字典，朗文，柯林斯，牛津都是用了复数，不过在韦氏词典看到了用单数的用法。

在此保留看法，欢迎其他小伙伴给出意见~

文章翻译：

攻击的类型区分构成了Wrangham道德学说的基石。另一个重要的要素是人类驯化论，这对解释人类的进化史起着关键作用。长久以来，即便是达尔文也不认为人类驯化是必要的，因为驯化很明显需要有人主导这个过程，例如饲养人。但从没有人驯化人类过。

But while breeding, or artificial selection, requires an external agent, natural selection does not. If selection pressures work against aggressiveness, animals will self-domesticate. That humans have self-domesticated has grown increasingly obvious over the past half century. Even apart from increased docility—the primary index of domestication—humans show many signs of what has come to be recognized as the domestication syndrome: smaller bodies and brains, thinner bones, shorter faces, and reduced physical differences between males and females. Besides these anatomical markers, there are also behavioral and physiological ones, which involve fear response, playfulness, learning rates, sexual behavior, and hormone production, among others.

单词讲解：

work against:违背

index:指数；指标

syndrome: a set of qualities, events, or types of behaviour that is typical of a particular kind of problem〔标明某类问题的〕一组典型特征[事件，行为]

anatomical:解剖的

知识延伸：

达尔文曾经提出，驯化过的动物，大脑比它们的祖先来的小。

McAuliffe, Kathleen 2011年在《美国科普杂志：发现》刊登过一篇文章“现代人类如此聪明,为何大脑还会缩小?”（“If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?”）

文中写道，在过去2万年间，人类男性的平均脑容量从1500立方厘米下降到了1350立方厘米，几乎减少了一个网球体积的大小，而女性大脑也在以相同的比例减小。

所以为了不让自己变笨，大家一定要努力多思考，多学习~

文章翻译：

虽然饲养，或者人工选择需要有个外部媒介，但自然选择并不需要。若攻击性不利于自然生存，动物会自行驯化。过去半个世纪以来，人类进行了自身驯化的事实越来越清晰。人类除了越来越顺从(驯化的重要指标), 还展现了许多其他被驯化的特征：更小的身形和大脑，更细的骨头，更短的脸，男性和女性之间生理外表差距的缩小。除了这些生理标志，还有行为和精神状态上的驯化，包括恐惧反应，玩耍，学习速度，性行为，荷尔蒙分泌等。

What these markers all have in common is paedomorphism (literally, “child shape”). In dogs, foxes, guinea pigs, and many other species, domesticated animals resemble the juvenile stage of the wild animals that they descended from. Humans evolved from our Homo ancestor several hundred thousand years ago, and there aren’t sufficient fossils to demonstrate paedomorphism directly. But there are plenty of Neanderthal fossils, and comparisons strongly suggest that present-day humans are, in many respects, juvenilized—that is, domesticated—versions of our remote ancestors.

单词讲解：

paedomorphism:幼儿化

guinea pig:豚鼠

juvenile:少年的； （动物）幼小的

Homo ancestor:直立人祖先

Neanderthal: (生活在3.5万年至7万年之前的欧洲的)尼安德特人〔一种原始人种〕

juvenilized: juvenil(e) +ed(形容词后缀)= 幼年化的；逆向发育的

文章翻译；

所有的特征显示出一个共同点，即幼儿化。狗，狐狸，豚鼠等许多被驯化的物种外形类同它们祖先的幼年时期。人类是几十万年前从直立人进化而来的，因此没有足够的化石来直接体现幼儿化。然而通过对比众多尼安德特人化石可以发现，现代的人类从许多方面来说是祖先的幼年版，

Why did these changes happen? For an evolutionary biologist, that question is normally equivalent to asking, What adaptive purpose did they serve? In this case, however, the answer is unusual: none. A decades-long, painstaking experiment by two Russian geneticists working in Siberia showed that reduced brain size, thinner bones, and all of the other markers of domestication syndrome are merely incidental byproducts of a primary adaptation: reduced reactive aggression. In organisms selecting against such aggression, the migration of neural-crest cells—a special kind of cell that carries developmental instructions throughout the embryo and fetus—is delayed, resulting in smaller bodies, smaller brains, hormonal changes, and the rest.

单词讲解：

equivalent to: be equivalent to等同于...

byproduct:副产品

neural-crest:神经嵴

embryo:胚胎

fetus:胎儿

知识延伸：

神经嵴：神经嵴指神经沟闭合为神经管时，神经褶上的一部分细胞游离于神经管之外，形成的左右两条与神经管平行的细胞索。位于神经管的背外侧。神经嵴细胞可分化为、周围神经系统中的所有神经细胞和神经胶质细胞、肾上腺髓质中的嗜铬细胞、黑素细胞滤泡旁细胞。有人认为头颈部的部分骨、软骨、肌肉、结缔组织细胞和消化道、呼吸道、胰岛等处的APUD细胞，亦由神经嵴细胞分化而来。（百度百科）

文章翻译：

为什么会有这些变化？这等同于提问进化生物学家，这些变化起到什么进化作用?然而答案令人出乎意料：没有进化作用。曾有两位俄罗斯的基因学家针对这个问题在西伯利亚进行了几十年费力的研究，结果表明变小的大脑，更细的骨头，以及其他所有人类驯化的特征仅仅是自然进化中，反应性攻击弱化的副产品。自然选择弱化人类的反应性攻击，在这过程中，神经嵴（胚胎发育过程中发布指令的一类特殊细胞）的分化过程遭到了阻碍，导致了身形、大脑的变小，以及荷尔蒙激素的变化等等。

Studies have been fairly clear on this. What has been unclear is why human communities selected against reactive aggression. For Wrangham, the answer is that group life requires a minimum of stability. No trait is more disruptive than reactive aggression, which fuels such behaviors as quests for dominance and demands for submission; arrogance, bullying, and random violence; and the monopolizing of food and females. That is a behavioral profile of the alpha male, the arch-reactive aggressor. Communities must either endure such pests or eliminate them. Once humans could communicate (the origin of language can’t be further narrowed down than three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand years ago, but empathy or “shared intentionality” appears to be independent of language and might be sufficient for communication), the die was cast. The origin of domestication, Wrangham proposes, was the group execution of alpha males. Civilization is founded on capital punishment—or, to give it its anthropological name, “coalitionary proactive aggression.”

单词讲解：

monopolize:词根mono(单个)+pol(卖)+ize(动词后缀) 独家贩卖= 垄断 N.

Mono-单词：monopoly 垄断 v.； monologue 独白；monorail 单轨铁路；monolith 巨石

behavioral profile:行为轮廓，行为模式

arch-reactive: 词根arch-表主要的；此处理解为反应性攻击最强烈的雄性领导者

empathy:共情

Shared intentionality:共享意向

the die was cast: die N.骰子；骰子已被掷出= 木已成舟

anthropological:词根anthropology(人类学)+ical(形容词后缀)= 人类学的

coalitionary:词根coalition(联合)+ary(形容词后缀)= 联合的

文章翻译：

从研究结果看，人类的幼体化是明显的事实。然而为什么人类社群的进化会排斥反应性攻击呢？Wrangham认为，这是因为群居生活需要稳定。没有什么特征比反应性攻击更具破坏性的了。反应性攻击会加剧征服欲望和统治欲望；加剧傲慢，欺凌和毫无目的的暴力行为；加剧对食物和雌性的支配欲望。一般领头的雄性动物会体现出这些行为特征。社群要么只能容忍，要么就是除掉这样的雄性动物。而当人类语言形成时，这样的决定就不可避免（人类语言的形成目前只能追溯到30-50万年前，但“共情”，或者说“共享意向”似乎可以独立于语言，并且可以用于沟通）。Wrangham认为，人类驯化是从处死这些雄性头领开始的。文明从此在 死刑 --或者人类学上称为“联合的主动性攻击”-- 的基础上得以发展.

The executioners were adult males, usually married. (One of alpha males’ most salient offenses was commandeering other men’s wives.) Over time, as alpha individuals were regularly killed and the gene for reactive aggression became less frequent in a population, the coalition of executioners became more stable. Their power was, in effect, absolute—anticipating Max Weber’s famous definition of the state: the agency with a recognized “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” Staying on the right side of these executioners came to seem a matter of life and death (by murder or—what often amounted to the same thing—ostracism). Community members would have welcomed rules that told them which behaviors were dangerous. They would also have cultivated a reputation for beneficence, since antisocial behavior was the original sin. These developments may have given rise to two of the most distinctive features of human morality: our orientation to abstract standards of right and wrong, and our much greater degree of prosociality—altruism, coöperation, fairness, etc.—than is found in other primates.

单词讲解：

salient:显著的

commandeer:强占，夺取

Amount to:等同于

ostracism:排斥

beneficence:仁慈

give rise to :引起，导致

altruism:利他主义

文章翻译：

执行死刑的一般是已婚的成年男性（男性头领最显著的罪恶一般是侵占其他男性的妻子）。随着时间的逝去，侵略性的男性头领被处死，反应性攻击的基因在人口中的比例逐渐减小，死刑执行者的合作也越发稳定。这些执行者的权利逐渐增大，垄断了武力的合法使用，正如同Max Weber著名的国家定义：人们所认可的合法武力使用者。是否与执行者形成统一战线成为生死攸关的问题，要么死，要么被排斥。群体中的成员乐意接受告知他们哪些行为是属于危险的规定，同时也培养自己仁慈的名声，因为反社会行为会被认为是罪恶。这些发展形成了人类道德上最重要的两个品质-- 我们对是非标准的定义，以及我们与其他灵长类动物相比更高的亲社会行为--利他主义，合作行为，公平主义等等。

By making us reflect on the rightness of our actions, capital punishment gave birth to virtue. But in replacing the limited power of the alpha male with the unlimited power of executioners and eventually of the state, Wrangham writes, “coalitionary proactive aggression is responsible for execution, war, massacre, slavery, hazing, ritual sacrifice, torture, lynchings, gang wars, political purges, and similar abuses of power.” That is the book’s constitutive paradox. Planned, coördinated violence gave us a social order that made virtue adaptive. But that social order also made exploitation and oppression possible, either by the state or by favored or powerful subgroups. We are, Wrangham concludes, “the best and worst of species.”

单词讲解：

reflect on: reflect原意“反射”，此处延伸为“沉思、表达”

例句：he reflected on the ingredients for success.他沉思成功的秘诀是什么。

He reflected that this was the best dish he had ever tasted.他说这是他吃过最好的料理。

massacre: N.大屠杀   massacre of...对...的大屠杀；可作动词 V. 屠杀

例句：the massacre of thousands of innocent people对无数无辜人民的大屠杀

Countless animals are massacred every year.每年有无数动物惨遭屠杀

hazing: Hazing is a ritual practised in some universities and other institutions, in which a new member of a club or society is humiliated or abused. (对新生或新成员的惯例)捉弄; 欺负

lynching:私刑绞死

constitutive:组成部分的

文章翻译：

死刑通过让我们思考什么是正确的行为，形成了道德观。但力量有限的男性头领也被力量无限的执行者替代，最终形成政府体系。Wrangham写到，联合的主动型攻击导致了死刑，战争，屠杀，奴隶制，欺辱，宗教献祭，折磨，绞刑，帮派斗争，政治肃清及力量的滥用。这也是本书中的一大悖论。有计划性的，统一的暴力帮助我们形成社会秩序和道德观，然而新的社会秩序也赋予了政府或其隶属机构剥削和压迫人民的可能性。Wrangham总结道：“我们是最好也是最坏的物种。”

Wrangham is anxious not to be misunderstood. There is apparently a Rousseauist faction of social scientists who resist the idea that any violent tendency is inherited, on the ground that militarists will then dismiss all demands for peace as against nature, or that male violence against women will be excused as “natural.” This is a perennial objection to one or another aspect of evolutionary theory: it has no business being true, so it isn’t. But such objections greatly overestimate the political importance of what we believe about evolution, and indeed of ideology in general. It may never be known precisely how genes and culture interact to determine any complex behavior. But enough is known to vindicate the common-sense intuition that both matter. Our genes are not our doom.

单词讲解：

Rousseauist:卢梭主义者

perennial:长期存在的 (问题、困难)

has no business: have no business (doing sth) means to have no legitimate reason to do something.没权利做...

例句：

He has no business reading my diary.他没权利看我的日记。

vindicate:证明

doom: something very bad that is going to happen, or the fact that it is going to happen

〔不可避免的〕厄运，劫数N.

V. Be doomed to...注定要...(结果通常不好) （写作词汇）

He thinks all species are doomed to disappear.他认为所有物种终要消失。

长句讲解：

It may never be known precisely (how genes and culture interact to determine any complex behavior). But enough is known to vindicate the common-sense intuition (that both matter).

[if !supportLists]1. [endif]Precisely，副词，起到修饰作用，省略

[if !supportLists]2. [endif]How genes...behavior起到补充说明作用：不会被知道的内容是什么

[if !supportLists]3. [endif]That both matter修饰补充intuition.  Both指代前面讲到的genes和culture.

知识延伸：

卢梭认为人性本善，社会和文明的发展使得人类脱离了原始的善良，变得善于比较，嫉妒。刚好与文中Wrangham的观点相反。

文章翻译：

Wrangham的文字已经在尽力避免读者误解。不过显然有一群科学家是卢梭主义的拥护者，他们坚决反对人类继承了暴力基因的言论，理由是，如果这样，军事家出于本性会拒绝和平，男性对女性的暴力行为也会被合理化。对生物进化论总是有这么一条反对理由：没理由证明它是正确的，所以这个理论是错的。然而这样的反对声高估了进化论对政治以及人类意识形态的影响。我们无从得知基因和文化是如何相互影响形成今天复杂的行为方式，但我们已经知道的足够多，足以相信人类的常识直觉，即基因和文化两者都是重要的。我们的基因并不是厄运。

Whether or not Wrangham is right—and no theory this complex and ambitious is ever more than partly right—there is something impressive, even moving, about the book’s sifting, weighing, and fitting together of evidence from a half-dozen continents, a dozen disciplines, several dozen species, and two million years into a large and intricate structure. There is also a lesson: evolution is much less relevant to our growth than moral imagination. “History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential,” Wrangham protests. We shouldn’t assume that human nature makes progress toward equality and peace either impossible or inevitable. It’s neither; it’s just damned hard.

单词讲解：

fit together: to put the parts of something together.把...组装在一起

half-dozen: one half of a dozen六个

far more:许多的； far adv. = much 很，非常

类似搭配：farless/better/easier/more difficult

theorize: theor(y)(理论)+ize(动词词根)=从理论上提供说明；推测

inevitable:不可避免的

damned: adv.加强语气，相当于 very

长句讲解：

[if !supportLists]1. [endif]no theory (this complex and ambitious) is (ever) more than partly right

这句话比较困难，this complex and ambitious在此修饰 theory. 英语中有前轻后重的习惯，意思就是越长的成分往后靠，所以这里theory的形容词后置。

同理：That he won the race was good news.

主语that he won the race太长，虽然语法没问题，但一般习惯后置，

改后= The good news was that he won the race.

另外可以不看ever（adv. 从来，等同“at any time”）

解决了这里，此句的大意也就基本清晰了。

[if !supportLists]2. [endif]We shouldn’t assume that human nature makes progress toward equality and peace either impossible or inevitable.

“that...and peace”充当assume的宾语，either impossible or inevitable做修饰补充, 做类似“宾补”成分。

宾补：简单来说就是补充说明宾语的东东~

例句：I find learning English interesting.那么interesting 做宾补，修饰English。

文章翻译：

无论Wrangham的理论是否正确（其实像这样复杂、宏大的理论多数是只有部分正确的），他在书中对来自六大洲、十几门学科、几十个物种，以及两百多万年的证据进行筛选、权衡和重组，这令人印象深刻，也令人十分感动。同时我们也学习到：在我们的成长上，进化带来的影响不如道德想象多。“进化论是从理论上告知我们人类的潜能，而历史对我们的影响更重要，”Wrangham抗议道。我们不应该相当然的认为, 人类本性使平等和和平的发展变成不可能或必然，两种态度都不对。这其实就是一件难事。