关于我们自身、世界与宇宙的100个未解之谜 由...支持 你为你的下巴感到自豪吗？
100 Unanswered Questions About Ourselves, Our World and Our Universe Supported by Are you proud of your chin?
你应该感到自豪。事实上，现在就给它一个欣赏性的摩挲，或在镜前端详一番：那个伸出在牙齿前方的骨性突起，是将你与动物界其他成员区分开来的特征。即使是你已灭绝的古人类表亲——那些像人类一样直立行走、甚至有时与人类交配的神秘尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人——也从未拥有过下巴。
You should be. In fact, give it an appreciative rub right now, or admire it in the mirror: That bony protuberance jutting out past your teeth is a trait that distinguishes you from the rest of the animal kingdom. Even your extinct hominin cousins — those enigmatic Neanderthals and Denisovans who strode bipedally like humans and even sometimes mated with them — never belonged to the chin club.
但为什么只有我们有？对此谜题有着深刻见解的人类之一是丹尼尔·利伯曼，哈佛大学的进化生物学家。他之所以热衷思考这个问题，部分原因是他的学生也热衷于此。当他在课堂上抛出这个问题时，他说，“总能让他们坐立难安，尽管这完全无关紧要。”利伯曼博士是《纽约时报》科学版的撰稿人和编辑最近向其提问的100位科学家之一，他们提出的问题是：“你所在领域的一个重大未解之谜是什么？”
But why just us? One human who has deep thoughts on that mystery is Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard. It’s a question he loves to ponder in part because his students love to ponder it, too. When he poses it to them in class, he says, “it always gets them on the edge of their seat, even though it’s completely unimportant.”Dr. Lieberman is one of 100 scientists to whom the writers and editors on The Times’s Science desk recently posed a query of their own: “What is a big unanswered question in your field?”
来自生物化学家、量子物理学家、考古学家、海洋学家、诺贝尔奖获得者生物学家、地球科学家、昆虫学家等各个领域的回复如潮水般涌来。
Responses poured in from biochemists, quantum physicists, archaeologists, oceanographers, Nobel Prize-winning biologists, geoscientists, entomologists, you name it.
向下滚动，您可以阅读他们回复的100个问题——这份清单展示了科学使命与思维模式迷人的广度。一些问题直指具体的日常奥秘（“蚂蚁如何协作产生群体的集体行为？”生物学家德博拉·戈登问道）。另一些则追问第一性原理：“是什么决定了我们宇宙中存在的物理定律？”天体物理学家凯蒂·麦克发出疑问。还有一些表达了解决人类难题的迫切愿望——例如“我们能否让野生动物贸易实现可持续？”以及“能否安全地逆转人类衰老过程？”
Scroll down and you can read the 100 questions they sent back — a list that demonstrates the fascinating range of the scientific mission and mind-set. Some questions aim at concrete, day-to-day mysteries (“How do ants work together to produce the collective behavior of colonies?” asks Deborah Gordon, a biologist). Others interrogate first principles: “What determines the laws of physics as they exist in our universe?”Katie Mack, an astrophysicist, wonders. Still others express an urgency about human problems that want solving — like “Can we make the wildlife trade sustainable?” and “Can the human aging process be safely reversed?”
还有一些问题，如利伯曼博士的提问，纯粹出于对知识本身的好奇。他指出，各种假说都试图解释下巴为何可能帮助祖先生存，但都讲不通。唯一剩下的解释是性选择：也许下巴让某些古人类更具异性吸引力，从而在漫长岁月中保留了这一特征。但这一理论无法证实；验证它需要“展示没有下巴的人的照片，询问你是否愿意与他们同床共枕”，利伯曼博士指出，这“是一个糟糕透顶的实验”。
And some, like Dr. Lieberman’s, express a pure curiosity for its own sake. Various hypotheses have tried to explain why chins might have helped our ancestors survive, he notes, but none really make sense. The only one left is sexual selection: Maybe chins made some hominins more attractive to the opposite sex, and the trait won out over time. But the theory is impossible to prove; testing it would entail “showing pictures of people without chins and asking if you would sleep with them,” which, Dr. Lieberman notes, is “a terrible experiment.”