In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering.
几万亿几万亿个反射性的化学反应，以我们才刚刚开始知道的方式，加起来形成能行动、有思想、有主见的你——或者形成一个不大有思想而又依然结构有序的金龟子。千万不要忘记，每个生物都是一个原子工程方面的奇迹。
Indeed, some organisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular organization that makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.
有一些我们认为是很原始的生物有着某种层面的细胞组织，使得我们自己的细胞组织看上去马虎潦草，平淡无奇。将海绵的细胞分解开（比如通过过滤器过滤），然后把它们倒进溶液中，它们会很快重新聚合，再次形成海绵。你可以反复做这种实验，它们总会顽固地重新聚合在一起。这是因为，就像你和我，以及所有别的生物那样，它们有一种不可抗拒的冲动：继续活下去。
And that's because of a curious, determined, barely understood molecule that is itself not alive and for the most part doesn't do anything at all. We call it DNA, and to begin to understand its supreme importance to science and to us we need to go back 160 years or so to Victorian England and to the moment when the naturalist Charles Darwin had what has been called "the single best idea that anyone has ever had"—and then, for reasons that take a little explaining, locked it away in a drawer for the next fifteen years.
而这一切都是因为存在一种非常古怪、坚定不移、我们所知甚少的分子。这种分子本身没有生命，它们中的绝大多数根本不做任阿事情。它的名字叫DNA。在开始了解它对于科学和对于我们所具有的极端重要性之前，我们有必要先回到大约160年前维多利亚时代的英国，即博物学家查尔斯·达尔文所生活的时期。当时，达尔文提出了一种“有史以来最好的理论”——可是在随后的15年里却被锁在抽屉里。其中原因，我们得花费一些笔墨才能解释清楚。
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