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Human life has changed so much in modern times.
人类生活在现代发生了很大的变化。
If someone could parachute in from say, you know, 1800 to the modern day, it would be a bewildering experience in so many facets.
比如，如果有人能从1800年穿越到现代，那他可能会在很多方面都极其困惑。
Whether it's how we make our food, transportation, energy, disease, medicine, enormous transformation of how we live.
不管是食物、交通、能源、疾病、医学等各方面，我们的生活方式都发生了巨大转变。
And our lives have changed a lot by really gaining control over nature.
而且在控制大自然这方面，人类的生活也发生了巨大变化。
If you consider nature, vulnerability to the elements, which includes things like drought and famine, which are gonna affect the abundance of food and water, infectious disease, wild animals, etc., almost all that has changed for most people on the planet.
还有一些自然因素，包括干旱和饥荒等会影响食物和水的丰裕程度的因素，传染病、野生动物等，对地球上大多数人来说，这一切几乎都已经变了。
And so that's really changed, fundamentally, the quality and quantity of life.
从根本上来说，生命的质量和数量都改变了。
And central to a lot of these changes are, for example, the science of biology: by discovering more and more about how nature works.
而且，这些变化的核心都是生物学科学：越来越多地发现关于自然运作方式的知识。
And that knowledge has been power.
而这种知识就是力量。
For example, we didn't know about viruses and bacteria until the last 150 years, and we didn't know much about how to manage them until probably the last 70 to 75 years.
例如，直到过去的150年，我们才了解病毒和细菌，而直到大概过去的70到75年，我们才对应对病毒和细菌有了更多了解。
In the 19th century, a very large percentage of Americans had TB.
在19世纪，大部分美国人都患有肺结核。
You know, now we would think about that disease as, you know, "Where did that go?"
现在，我们想到这种病，会纳闷儿“它去哪儿了？”
In the 1960s in the United States, there was a rubella outbreak.
在20世纪60年代的美国，爆发了风疹。
We don't hear the word rubella much because it's the R in the MMR vaccine.
现在我们不怎么听说风疹这个词，因为它是MMR疫苗中的R。
Smallpox, which killed tens and tens and tens of millions of people, not only has been controlled, it has been eradicated from the planet.
天花，曾经夺走了数千万人的生命，现在它不仅得到了控制，而且已经从地球上根除。
From every nook and cranny of the planet, smallpox is gone.
地球的任何地方都没有天花了。
So the advent of vaccines, of antibiotics, of antivirals, and of better sanitation, has dramatically reduced what people deal with.
所以，疫苗、抗生素、抗病毒药物的出现，以及卫生条件的改善，极大地减少了人们需要应对的疾病。
And with respect to agriculture and food production, a remarkable statistic is that around 1900, perhaps 40% of the United States labor force was involved in farming and agriculture in some way- that's now 2%.
至于农业和粮食生产，有一个显著的统计数据，大约在1900年，可能有40%的美国劳动力以某种方式参与了农业和农业生产，而现在这一比例只有2%。
And that 2% is providing a lot more food for a lot more people than it ever did. And of course, exporting around the world.
而且这2%提供的食物比以往任何时候都多，养活的人也更多。当然了，还包括出口到世界各地。
So the efficiency of agriculture, the productivity of agriculture is remarkably different.
所以，农业的效率，农业生产力有了显著的变化。
Some of that is due to automation, but a lot of that is due to discoveries about better seeds, better ways of nourishing crops, better ways to fight off plant diseases.
部分原因是自动化的出现，但更多是因为发现了更好的种子， 更好的滋养作物的方法， 更好的抵御植物疾病的方法。
You know, now we enjoy a much more secure food supply than we did a hundred years ago.
现在我们享有的食物供应比一百年前安全得多。
So these are important biological impacts on us, but I often get the question, you know, Is our species evolving?
这些都对人类产生了重要的生物学影响，但我经常会被问到这个问题，“人类这个物种还在进化吗？”
And that, I don't have a really clear picture of that.
关于这一点，我并没有非常清晰的认知。
If you go back in time, say 60,000 years ago, when humanity left Africa, when the first migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa happened, and this was gonna lead to the settling, you know, of humans on five more continents.
如果回到过去，比如6万年前，当人类离开非洲时，当智人第一次迁徙离开非洲时，这会让人类在另外五个大陆上定居。
If we had sort of stayed as isolated populations, unconnected, not able to travel the seas, not able to go across land, bridges and things like this, then you would have essentially these sophisticated, you know, human populations in different places, but not sharing genes, not sharing culture.
如果我们一直保持孤立的状态，彼此隔绝，无法穿越海洋，无法跨越陆地、桥梁之类的，那么复杂的人类就会分布在不同的地方，但不会共享基因，也不会共享文化。
That sets up the situation for evolution.
这就为进化创造了条件。
I mean, isolation is sort of, you know, evolution's laboratory.
我的意思是，在某种程度上，隔离就是进化实验室。
This is why the Galapagos finches are such an example of evolution is that isolation factor gives the opportunity for speciation to occur.
加拉帕戈斯雀类就是一个关于进化的典型例子，因为隔离为物种形成提供了机会。
But because now we are so connected as a species, sharing genes and culture across the globe, that's going to work against sort of whatever biological evolution might be underway because of how we've changed our food supply and changed our relationship to infectious diseases and things like that.
但现在，我们这个物种联系紧密，全球都共享基因和文化，这会对正在进行的任何生物进化产生不利影响，因为我们已经改变了食物供应，改变了我们与传染病等事物的关系。
And of course, you can see in certain human populations that are specialized to high altitude or certainly across different latitudes in terms of how much sunlight they get.
当然，你会看到，某些人群专门在高海拔地区生活，或者就他们获得的阳光量而言，是在不同的纬度生活。
You know, obviously Northern Europeans and Equatorial Africans, we all look differently because those are actually local adaptations.
很明显，北欧人和赤道非洲人，看起来都不一样，是因为局部适应。
But those aren't fundamentally, you know, speciation events happening.
但从根本上来说，这些并不是物种形成事件。
So anatomically and physiologically, I would say, I don't think we've evolved much.
从解剖学和生理学的角度来看，我觉得我们并没有进化太多。
You know, cultural evolution can be very, very, very rapid, but our biological evolution is relatively slow.
文化的更新迭代极其迅速，但我们的生物进化却相对较慢。
So there's a lot of mismatches, like our physiology, which was wired to seek out various nutrients that might have been very hard to get as a hunter-gatherer, but are now very easy to get at the grocery store, means that, you know, our diets are so radically different than what had evolved, you know, by 10,000 years ago- that's showing up as all sorts of, you know, syndromes in humanity.
所以存在很多不匹配的情况，比如我们的生理机能，它天生就要寻找各种营养物质，这些营养物质在狩猎采集时代可能很难获得，但现在很容易就能在杂货店买到，这意味着，我们的饮食与1万年前进化而来的饮食有很大不同，这呈现出来就是人类的各种综合征。
And perhaps, that's one of the things that overwhelms us is that, you know, biology's not evolving as rapidly as culture.
也许，让我们摸不着头脑的事情之一就是，生物学的进化速度不如文化快。
