Name: 理查德-道金斯 - 查爾斯-達爾文的天才 - 第2部分：第五猿[+字幕] (Richard Dawkins - The Genius of Charles Darwin - Part 2: The Fifth Ape [+Subs])
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:25:19.000Z
Duration: 48 min 21 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

過去完成式

Once, people thought God had created the world and every living thing,

each with a purpose in an ordered universe over which our creator presided,

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection

blew a hole in this comfortable explanation of life

and faced us with a blindingly obvious yet disturbing truth -

But even Darwin hesitated to say this out loud.

It throws into question our trust in our fellow human beings.

Are our morals and manners just a veneer?

Since a struggle for existence drives evolution,

why don't we humans run an entirely dog-eat-dog world?

the issue that Darwin skirted around in The Origin Of Species,

I want to ask what it means for us to be evolved.

Increasingly, religious people and others attack Darwinism for, in their view,

Throughout my career, I've wrestled with how to reconcile my liberal values

with what Darwin revealed to be the pitiless war of nature.

So now I'm going to take you into the Darwinian heart of darkness

Natural selection is the driving force of our evolution,

but that doesn't mean that society ought to be run on Darwinian lines.

As a scientist, I'm thrilled by natural selection,

but as a human being, I abhor it as a principle for organising society.

Evolution by natural selection is a very simple idea.

Over thousands of generations, in a struggle for existence,

successful variations have survived to reproduce,

the process that gradually carves life into more and more specialised forms.

gibbons, orang-utans, gorillas, chimps...and us.

the arrival of the first apes outraged polite society.

Queen Victoria, for one, found them painfully and disagreeably human.

The young Charles Darwin saw the unmistakable truth

staring back at him from the other side of the cage.

and the humanity we seem to glimpse in their eyes

was, for Darwin, further evidence to support the idea of evolution,

The African apes, he realised, were our closest evolutionary cousins.

East Africa - my birthplace and, rather more importantly,

the birthplace of the human species itself.

there lived in Africa an ape who had two children.

One of those children was destined to give rise to us,

the other was destined to give rise to the chimpanzees.

If I stood here and held my mother's hand,

and she held her mother's hand, and so on,

back to the grand ancestor of all humans and all chimpanzees,

the fossil record shows evidence of extraordinary changes.

The palaeontologist Richard Leakey and his family

have uncovered the hard evidence in Kenya's Rift Valley,

evidence that charts the evolution of our ancient human ancestors.

This is what they were calling Homo habilis.

Largish brains, still got a flat, big face,

and probably ancestral to Homo erectus, which turns up in Africa

This, then, is the ancestor to Homo sapiens.

This persists for almost a million years, this condition,

and then it gives way to something with an even larger brain -

things that are much more like ourselves.

It's much more like a modern human brain in terms of size

all of these others have disappeared from the fossil record.

So all the major steps in the human story are, in fact, told in Africa.

I often meet people who say to me, "Nobody's going to tell me I'm an ape."

Is there a kind of visceral revulsion? Do you meet that, as well?

Yes, I do, but it seems to be so misplaced

because, as you know, we are the fifth ape.

We never separated from the apes, we just do things differently.

I've often found it fun to go to an ape exhibit in one of the big zoos

and you can watch people looking at a group of chimpanzees,

and what is very clear, if you watch their facial expression,

you can see that they're not so sure that that ape's like them

but they can look around and say, "There's a similarity

"between the person on the other side of the cage."

Horses and asses put together produce offspring.