What are you doing when you aren’t doing anything at all If you said "nothing," then you have just passed a test in logic and failed a test in neuroscience. (46)When people perform mental tasks, different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But whatThe answer, it seems, is time travel. (47)The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not, but the human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time Perhaps it’s because an experi- ence is a terrible thing to waste.(48)Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. Animals learn by trial and error, and the smarter they are, the fewer trials they need. Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely. (49)Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences en- ables us to learn from mistakes without making them. The dark network allows us to visit the future, but not just any future: only when we move ourselves through time does it come alive.Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn’t what it does but how often it does it. Neurosci- entists refer to it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it. (50)People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave; it is only when the environment demands our attention that our mental time ma- chines switch themselves off. We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off again to the land of Elsewhen, our dark networks awash in fight. When people perform mental tasks, different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background.
People are unselfish because they are militaristic, and cultured because they are common. At least that is the message of a couple of new studies. Two of the oddest things about people are morality and culture. Neither is unique to humans,-but Homo sapiens (humans) have both in an abundance missing from other species. (41) ______How these human traits evolved is controversial. But two papers may throw light on the process. In one, Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico fieshes out his paradoxical theory that much of human virtue was forged in the war. Comrades in arms, he believes, become comrades in other things, too. (42) ______. It also requires a dense population.Dr Bowles’s argument starts in an obscure crack of evolutionary theory called group selection. This suggests that groups of collaborative individuals will often do better than groups of selfish ones, and thus prosper at their expense. (43)______This good-of-the-group argument was widely believed until the 1960s, when it was subject to rigorous scrutiny and found wanting~ The new theory does not pitch groups against groups, or even individuals against individuals, but genes against genes. In fact, this theory does not disallow unselfish behavior. (44)______. The "selfish gene" analysis, so called after a book by Richard Dawkins, makes good-of-the-group theory almost impossible to achieve.Dr Bowles has focused the argument on war, since it is both highly collaborative and often genetically terminal for the losers. In his latest paper he puts some numbers on the idea. He looks at the data, plugs them into a mathematical model of his devising and finds a pleasing outcome.Dr Thomas and his colleagues also rely on a mathematical model. The model suggested that once more than about 50 groups were in contact with one another, the complexity of skills that could be maintained did not increase as the number of groups increased. Rather, it was population density that turned out to be the key to cultural sophistication. (45)______Dr Thomas therefore suggests that the reason there is so little sign of culture until 90,000 years ago is that there were not enough people to support it. According to him, culture was not invented once, when people had become clever enough, and then gradually built up into the edifice it is today. Rather, it came and went as the population waxed and waned. Since the invention of agriculture, of course, the population has done nothing but wax. The consequences are all around you.[A] In the other paper, Mark Thomas and his colleagues at University College, London, suggest that cultural sophistication depends on more than just the evolution of intelligence.[B] It is therefore no surprise, according to group-selectionists, that individuals might be genetically predetermined to act in self-sacrificial ways.[C] But it requires that this evolve in a way that promotes the interest of a particular gene--for example by helping close relatives who might also harbor the gene in question.[D] This, he contends, allows the evolution of collaborative, unselfish traits that would not otherwise be possible.[E] The more people there were, the more exchange there was between groups and the richer the culture of each group became.[F] Indeed, that abundance--of concern for the well-being of others, (even unrelated others), and of finely crafted material objects both useful and ornamental--is seen by many as the mark of man, as what distinguishes humanity from mere beasts.[G] They note the word "almost" in the argument above and contend that humans, with their high intelligence and possession of language, and their tendency to live in small, tightly knit groups, might be exceptional. 45
社会学家们对于一个社会是怎样形成与怎样发展起来的很感趣。
Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler’s $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France’s Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its £3.6 billion ( $6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder’s approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think thin these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold. M&A’s poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people’s thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated. The case of Daimler-Chrysler is employed in the text as______.
A. an illustration of an evaluation criterion
B. an explanation of a spectacular failure
C. a discussion of a mobile operator
D. a guarantee of a harsh judgement