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6500萬年前,一件非常重要且充滿毀滅性的事件改變了陸上生物進程,雖然我們知道我所要講的陸上動物只是地球陸地上的「殘渣」,一塊塊漂浮的陸塊,但牠們對我們很重要,因為計量牠們以公尺計,不同於我們習慣的公釐。
可是牠們消失了,而另外一種生物,哺乳類,我們清楚知道哺乳類大幅繁衍取而代之,這是來自百幕達附近的岩蕊,我們瞭解人類有史以來經歷的海嘯、地震和很多事,但都無法避免這類災難對地球的影響。
所以,在大家知道有這起撞擊之前,甚至在科學家同意演化論之前,各領域的科學家和自然歷史學家,實際上是把地球生命史分成兩個時期:中生代(中期生命)和新生代(近期生命),而這種分類法也確實貼切符合地質學的歷史,因此有中生代時期,即分裂年代,和新生代時期,即重合年代,南美與北美重合,印度和亞洲大陸重合。
事實上,我的工作就是試圖理解中生代擴散的特點,對比新生代擴散的特點,看看是否能從恐龍,和其他生活在移動陸塊上的生物身上瞭解演化論的謎題。
這項工作立即帶出一個問題:牠們為何沒有潛進水中?當然,哺乳類是潛水的實例,你可以從外頭的世界找出更多實例,在大隕石撞擊地球後的五百,甚至一千萬年間,很多種動物潛進水中生活,牠們為何沒有這麼做?牠們為何不保持適當的體型掛在樹上?或是挖洞?牠們為何不這麼做?又如果牠們全沒有做這些事,當初這些空間又出現何種動物?又如果那些空間沒有動物,我們又如何瞭解到陸上是如何演化?很有趣的問題。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
65 million years ago, a very important and catastrophic event changed the course of life on land. And although we know that the land animals I'm going to talk about are just the scum of the earth on the land -- the little bits of land floating around -- but they are important to us because they're sort of in our scale of experience from millimeters to meters. And these animals disappeared, and a separate life, mammals, radiated out to take their place. And so, we know this, in extraordinary detail. And so this is a core from near Bermuda. We know that the tsunamis, the earthquakes, and the things that we've experienced in the entire record of humankind history can't really quite get around the kind of disaster that this represented for the Earth.
So even before that impact was known, even before scientists in general came to an agreement over the theory of evolution, scientists and natural historians of all kinds of stripes actually had divided Earth's life's history into these two episodes: Mesozoic, the middle life, and the Cenozoic, the recent life. And as it turns out, it actually corresponds really nicely with geologic history. So we have a Mesozoic period, an age of fragmentation, and a Cenozoic period, an age of reconnection -- South America to North America, India to Asia. And so my work, really, is trying to understand the character of that Mesozoic radiation compared to the Cenozoic radiation to see what mysteries we can understand from dinosaurs and from other animals about what life on drifting continents really can tell us about evolution.
The work immediately begs the question, "Why didn't they go into the waters?" I mean, certainly mammals did. This is one example. You can go outside -- see many other examples. Within five, 10 million years of the bolide impact we had a whole variety of animals going into the water. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't they hang around in trees at good size, and why didn't they burrow? Why didn't they do all these things, and if they didn't do all these things, what kinds of animals were in those spaces? And if there were no animals in those spaces, what does that tell us about, you know, how evolution works on land? Really interesting questions.
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我認為體型的影響深遠,事實上,我認為最主要的關鍵就是體型,當生物承繼因任何自然災害空出的生態空間,這些生物當時的體型,我多年來追尋恐龍演化,研究和挖掘,結果是追尋哺乳類的擴散,似乎每件事發生在一瞬間,像科技一樣 以數量級比例推進。
恐龍的演化是以穩重的步調推進,比你想用來測量的數量級都較慢,以演化多樣性來測量或者以時間來測量,測量牠們長到最大體型所需時間,牠們的確有較大體型,但有很多的體型較小,而我們感興趣的是,牠們要多少時間才演化到這樣的體型,五千萬年才演化到這最大的體型,十倍於哺乳類,演化到最大體型的時間,和進入全部棲息地的時間,這裡面有很多學問,包括例外的案例,今日我們已發現且非常熟悉的例外,以及全球許多其他學者的發現。
先前發表的圖片是著名的侏羅紀始袓鳥,我們現在明白這個轉折時刻,當時恐龍的體型的確縮小了,我們馬上就看看牠們是從何處開始,也就在這時刻牠們大量入侵所有棲息地,我剛才提到恐龍不在其中,牠們變成海洋動物,我們從冰帽中得到驗證。
這是挖洞的鳥,以各種體型棲息在樹上,當然也住在地上,我們實際命名這系列生物,其後《科學》與《自然》頁面全是牠,這隻鳥名為「中國鳥」,比始袓鳥進化一些,但如果你從不同的層次來看,會發現比始袓鳥原始的東西,兩個層次間什麼都有,所以若有新發現,我們通常扯斷毛髮,或更貼切地說是扯斷羽毛,以確定牠...為非鳥類或鳥類。
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I think a lot of it has to do with body size. In fact, I think that most of it has to do with body size -- the size you are when you inherit a vacant ecospace from whatever natural disaster.
Looking at dinosaur evolution and studying it, digging it up, for many years, I end up looking at the mammal radiation, and it seems as though everything is quick time, just like technology, advancing by an order of magnitude. Dinosaur evolution proceeded at a stately pace, an order of magnitude slower on any way you want to measure it. You want to measure it by diversity? You want to measure it by the time it took to reach maximum body size? Yes, they do have larger body size, but many of them are smaller, but we're interested in the time it took them to achieve that. 50 million years to achieve this maximum body size. And that is 10 times longer than it took the mammals to achieve maximum body size and invade all those habitats.
So there's lessons to learn, and there's lessons to learn from the exception, the exception that we know very well today from the discoveries we've made, and many other scholars have made around the world. This slide was shown before. This is the famous Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx. We now know this transition is the one time that dinosaurs actually went below that body size -- we're going to see where they began in a minute -- and it is the one time that they rapidly invaded all the habitats I just told you that dinosaurs weren't in. They became marine. We now know them today from the ice caps. There's burrowing birds. They inhabit the trees at all body sizes, and, of course, they inhabit the land.
So we were the first to actually name that later exploded onto the pages of Science and Nature. We called this bird Sinornis. It's a little bit more advanced than Archaeopteryx, and if you go to different layers, you find things that are less advanced than Archaeopteryx, and every grade in between, so that if you find something today, we're usually splitting hairs -- or, more appropriately, feathers -- as to decide whether it's actually a non-avian or an avian.
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這是陸地上經歷的最大轉折,橫跨各個棲息地,沒有任何阻攔,只為瞭解這種多骨,體型頗重一公斤或數公斤的動物,如何轉變,這真是我們最偉大(之一)的演化結果,我的工作是從頭開始,因為我認為要瞭解恐龍演化,就必需要回溯到當初他們挖出碎片的地層,回溯到恐龍最早存在的時空。
現在,讓我們來看一段短片,以便瞭解我們面臨的情況,通常我們被問到:「你們是怎會在這種地方找到化石」?請播放第一支影片,從直昇機上往下看的風景不錯,那些早期地層位於阿根廷的東北部,我們越過了斷崖,在崖上滿是恐龍的遺跡,但要在崖底找到牠們,卻像緣木求魚,可是發現恐龍源始的地方卻是在崖底。
進入這類的區域,你需地質圖、地形圖以及能帶入這區域最優秀、有啟發性的團隊,接下來就看你自己了,你必需要找到化石,你必需要挖洞,一般比這個較大才可以拿出化石,必需攀登那樣的斷崖,找出所有曾存在於此的東西,不只是恐龍,而是整個故事。
如果你走運,到像這樣的地方挖寶,且像我們一樣挖到藏有骨骸的地層,我們發現2億2800年前最原始的恐龍,名為Ur-恐龍,三英尺半,漂亮的頭骨、掠食者、食肉動物、雙腿,不同於你和你的小孩所知道的所有恐龍,因為牠們都是有四條腿;這是頭骨,五或六吋長真是了不起,看起來很像鳥,因為牠就是鳥,像鳥一樣中空,掠食者,約25磅重或是10公斤,這就是恐龍的起源及擴散的開始,10倍大於四腳哺乳類的擴散。
我們和恐龍極為相似,不尋常地在生活中以雙腳站立,如果你想要瞭解怎麼一回事,陸塊分離可能是原因之一,旱鴨子的恐龍隨著陸塊漂浮,這件事有一些失落的環節,大部份的環節掉在南方各大洲,因為這些大洲最少被探索,所以,如果你想補上這些環節,描繪出全球性的繪圖,你就必需要強迫自己走到地球的四個角落,非洲、印度、南極和澳洲,並開始將所有的環節組合起來。
我已去過一些大陸,非洲大部份仍是空白,就如同Steven Pinker所言,非洲中心有如龐大的黑板,很多小區有很多恐龍岩石,前提是你要能撐得過探險。撒哈拉沒有道路,且幅員遼闊,我們在撒哈拉掘出八十噸的恐龍,並將其運回,你必需要能組成可以處理各種狀況的探險隊,有些狀況是政治因素,有些是生理因素有些,也是最重要的是心理因素。
你真的必需要能受得起這些狀況,開車進沙漠,你看到很多種的地貌,通常的情況是,看看我們的發現,很多是初次面世,至於探險團隊?他們是一群瞭解科學並將其視作有目標的探險家,有些參與的學生從未見過沙漠,有一些則有較多的經驗,因為這絕對是團隊運動,作為領隊就是試著啟發他們貢獻有生以來最大的付出,而且是在他們無法想像的環境下。
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It is the greatest transition that we have, actually, on land from one habitat to another, bar none, to understand how a bony, fairly heavy, kilogram or a couple-of-kilogram animal could make such a transition. It is really our greatest -- one of our greatest -- evolutionary sequences.
Now, my work began at the beginning. I thought if I'm going to understand dinosaur evolution, I'd have to go back to those beds where they had picked up fragments, go back to a time and a place where the earliest dinosaurs existed. I'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of, sort of, what we face. Normally, we get asked a lot of questions: "Well, how do you find fossils in areas that look like this?" If we could roll that first video clip. This is sort of a nice helicopter ride through those early beds, and they're located in Northeastern Argentina. And we're coming over a cliff, and at the top of that cliff, dinosaurs had basically taken over. at the bottom of the cliff, we find that they're rare as hens' teeth. That's where dinosaur origins is to be found: at the bottom of the cliff.
You go into an area like this, you get a geologic map, you get a topographic map, and the best, most-inspired team you can bring to the area. And the rest is up to you. You've got to find fossils. You've got to dig a hole that's usually quite a bit bigger than that to get it out; you've got to climb those cliffs and find, really, everything that existed -- not just the dinosaurs, but the entire story. If you're lucky, and you dig a place like that, you actually find the ash bed to dig it, and we did. 228 million years old, we found what really is the most primitive dinosaur: that's the Ur-dinosaur. A three-and-a-half foot thing, beautiful skull, predator, meat-eater, a two-legged animal. So, all the other dinosaurs that you know, or your kids know, at least, on four legs. This is sort of a look at the skull, and it's an absolutely fantastic thing about five or six inches long. It looks rather bird-like because it is. It's bird-like and hollow. A predator. Maybe 25 pounds, or 10 kilograms. That's where dinosaurs began. That's where the radiation began. That is 10 times larger than the mammal radiation, which was a four-legged radiation. We are extremely dinosaur-like, and unusual in our two-legged approach to life.
Now, if you want to understand what happened then when the continents broke apart, and dinosaurs found -- landlubbers, as they are -- found themselves adrift. There's some missing puzzle pieces. Most of those missing puzzle pieces are southern continents because it was those continents that are least explored. If you want to add to this picture and try and sketch it globally, you really have to force yourself to go down to the four corners of the Earth -- Africa, India, Antarctica, Australia -- and start putting together some of these pieces. I've been to some of those continents, but Africa was, in the words of Steven Pinker, was a blank slate, largely. But one with an immense chalkboard in the middle, with lots of little areas of dinosaur rock if you could survive an expedition.
There's no roads into the Sahara. It's an enormous place. To be able to excavate the 80 tons of dinosaurs that we have in the Sahara and take them out, you really have to put together an expedition team that can handle the conditions. Some of them are political. Many of them are physical. Some of them -- the most important -- are mental. And you really have to be able to withstand conditions -- you have to drive into the desert, you will see landscapes in many cases -- you can see from what we've discovered -- that nobody else has ever seen. And the kinds of teams they bring in? Well, they're composed of people who understand science as adventure with a purpose. They're usually students who've never seen a desert. Some of them are more experienced.
Your job as a leader -- this is definitely a team sport -- your job as a leader is to try to inspire them to do more work than they've every done in their life under conditions that they can't imagine.
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所以,125度是正常,地表燒到150度也是平常,絕對不能將一般金屬曝曬在陽光下,因為偶爾拿起時你將會受到一級灼傷,但同時你也身處於迷人的文化氛圍,因為與你擦肩而過的是世上最後一支偉大的遊牧民族,這些是Tuareg遊牧民族,他們的生活數個世紀以來一直保持不變,團隊的工作是要挖出像相片前景的東西,將它們記入歷史的篇章。
為了達到這個目標,我們必需將挖到的東西運出到沙漠以外數千哩的地方,我們一直在談衣索比亞,但我們也來談談尼日或說奈及(英語發音),在奈及利亞北部,這張圖片是攝於該地,我們談論這國家基本上,在我們動工時並沒有貨櫃運輸,我們必需親自將骨骸運到,非洲的海岸裝上船,這是將化石運出撒哈拉沙漠的唯一方法,那是一趟2,000哩的旅程。
巨大的開挖工程,利用你見到這部份恐龍族群,重達20噸的材料,我們重塑約巴恐龍,在其他大陸上未曾見過的蜥腳類恐龍,牠看起來暫時還不很勻稱,牠不像任何我們在北美現代地層挖出的東西,這是讓牠遇上麻煩的動物。
但是慢慢地,種類愈來愈多,當你撿起這樣的東西,各位有機會碰觸這些,這是歷史的一部份,你碰觸的是1億1000萬年前的東西,這是趾爪剛發現時的樣子,這是生命的奇妙,而這都始於我們開始,瞭解時間的深度。
這還不到一個世紀,在這時間,這第四度空間,不到一世紀前有了放射性鑑年法,讓我們可以準確判斷化石的年代,也許是最影響深遠的轉化,因為這讓我們看待自己和世界的方法,戲劇性地改變了。
當我們撿起歷史的碎片,我認為可以改變那些可能對科學感興趣的學童,這是那隻趾爪的主人:似鱷龍,這裡還有一些,這是在摩洛哥挖到的巨大動物,我們用電腦化軸局部X射線檢法,掃描這隻動物的大腦並模擬出原形,牠竟然有前腦比人腦小15倍,這是《科學》的封面因為他們認為,人類比這些動物聰明,但只要看看我們政府的一些人,雖然腦容量有巨大優勢,但有些態度仍然沒變。
無論如何,小型暴龍,從電影「侏羅紀公園」所知道的恐龍,所有小型的動物,都來自北方大洲,這是第一付來自南方大陸的骨骸,可是猜猜怎麼什麼一回事,開始清理後發現,牠的後足沒有大爪,不像迅猛龍,牠是完全獨立擴散的類種。
所以我們要重組的是一則故事,內容有會飛的爬蟲,像我們從非洲重組的翼龍,當然還有鱷魚,我們還未替這隻命名,巨大的東西,這是躺在沙漠巨大鱷魚的下顎,鱷魚的學名為 Sarcosuchus,雙顎咬著成年Orinoco鱷魚,我們必需要試著重建,要實際觀察現代的鱷魚,才能瞭解鱷魚的比例,請播放第二支短片。
以一般科學而言,這個領域只是探險,我們必需要找到並測量,現今世上最大的鱷魚。
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So, 125 degrees is normal. The ground surface at 150 -- typical. So, you can't leave your normal metal tools out because you'll get a first-degree burn if you grab them sometimes. So, you are finding yourself also in an amazing cultural milieu. You're really rubbing shoulders with the world's last great nomadic people. These are the Tuareg nomads, and they're living their lives much as they have for centuries. Your job is to excavate things like this in the foreground, and make them enter the pages of history. To do that, you've got to actually transport them thousands of miles out of the desert.
We're talking about Ethiopia, but let's talk about Niger -- or Niger, in our English language -- north of Nigeria -- that's where this photograph was taken. Basically you're talking about a country that, when we started working there, did not have container traffic. You transported the bones out yourself to the coast of Africa, onto a boat, if you wanted to get them out of the middle of the Sahara. That's a 2,000 mile journey. So enormous excavations and a lot of work, and out of essentially a partial herd of dinosaurs that you saw buried there -- 20 tons of material -- we erect Jobaria, a sauropod dinosaur like we haven't seen on some other continents. It really is a little bit out of place temporally. It looks nothing like what we would find if we dug in contemporary beds in North America. Here's the animal that was causing it trouble.
And, you know, on and on -- a whole menagerie. When you pick up something like this -- and some of you have had the chance to touch it -- this is a piece of history. You're touching something that's 110 millions years old. This is a thumb claw. There it was, moments after it was discovered. It is an incredible view of life, and it really began when we began to understand the depth of time. It's only been with us for less than a century, and in that time, that fourth dimension, when radioactive dating came about, less than a century ago, and we could actually tell how old some of these things were, is probably the most profound transformation, because it changes the way we look at ourselves and the world dramatically. When you pick up a piece of history like that, I think it can transform kids that are possibly interested in science.
That's the animal that thumb claw came from: Suchamimus. Here's some others. This is something we found in Morocco, an immense animal. We prototyped by CAT-scanning the brain out of this animal. It turns out to have a forebrain one-fifteenth the size of a human. This was the cover of Science, because they thought that humans were more intelligent than these animals, but we can see by some in our administration that despite the enormous advantage in brain volume some of the attitudes remain the same. Anyway, smaller raptors. All the stuff from Jurassic Park that you know of -- all those small animals -- they all come from northern continents. This is the first skeleton from a southern continent, and guess what? You start preparing it. It has no big claw on its hind foot. It doesn't look like a Velociraptor. It's really a wholly separate radiation. So what we're trying to piece together here is a story. It involves flying reptiles like this Pterosaur that we reconstructed from Africa.
Crocodiles, of course, and that's a nasty one we haven't named yet. And huge things -- I mean, this is a lower jaw just laying there in the desert of this enormous crocodile. The crocodile is technically called Sarcosuchus. That's an adult Orinoco crocodile in its jaws. We had to try and reconstruct this. We had to actually look at recent crocodiles to understand how crocodiles scale. Could I have the second little video clip? Now, this field is just -- and, of course, science in general -- is just -- adventure. We had to find and measure the largest crocodiles living today.
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配音:... 和他們的船一樣長。
男人:看看大牙!這隻夠大了!
配音:如果他們能捕捉這隻鱷魚將提供有用的資料,幫助Paul進一步瞭解Sarcosuchus。
Paul:好,鬆一些。
男人:好。
配音:Paul負責將牠的眼睛遮起來。
Paul:小心!小心!不不不,你必需要抓住牠的後腿。
男人:抓住了。
Paul:抓住後腿了嗎?
男人:不,你抓住前腿,夥伴。
男人:抓住了,抓住後腿了,誰去抓住前腿。
Paul:我們用捲尺來量量,壓住牠,哇哦!65,哇哦!很大的頭骨!
配音:很大,但大小只有,超級巨鱷頭骨的一半 。
Paul:超大的!你們抓到了一隻 ... 14呎長的鱷魚!
男人:我就知道牠很大。
Paul:別放手,千萬別放手,不用擔心我。
配音:Paul已搜集到資料,所以他們決定將鱷魚放回河裡。
Paul:別放手!別放手!別放手!
配音:Paul未見過化石這樣的。
Paul:好,我數到三時,大家一起放手。
Paul:一,二,三!
哇呀!就這樣,化石記錄真的很神奇,因為這迫使你以新的角度來看待動物,我們透過測量證實鱷魚的大小是對等比例,視乎頭骨形狀,也因此我們要實際測量,才可以保證我們重建,並向科學界證明超級巨鱷實際上是40呎長的鱷魚,可能是雄性,另外,你還發現其他的東西。
我將帶領一支考察隊到撒哈拉沙漠挖掘非洲最大的新石器時代遺址,我們去年發現這個遺址,200多具骨骸、工具和珠寶,這是慶典用的圓盤,驚人的撒哈拉殖民史記錄5,000年之前就存在那裡,等待我們回去發掘,令人非常感到興奮。
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Narrator: ... as long as their boat.
Man: Look at that set of choppers! Yeah, he's a big one.
Narrator: If they can just land it, this croc will provide useful data, helping Paul in his quest to understand Sarcosuchus.
Man: OK, hand me some more here. Man 2: OK.
Narrator: It falls to Paul to cover its eyes.
Man: Watch out! Watch out! No, no, no, no. You're going to have to get on the back legs.
Man: I got the back legs.
Man 2: You have the back legs? No, you have the front legs, my friend. I've got it. I've got the back legs. Somebody get the front legs.
Paul Sereno: Let's get this tape measure on him. Put it right there. Wow. 65. Wow. That's a big skull.
Narrator: Big, but less than half the size of supercroc's skull.
Man: Enormous. PS: You've got a ... 14-foot croc.
Man: I knew it was big.
PS: Don't get off. You don't get off, but don't worry about me.
Narrator: Paul has his data, so they decide to release the animal back into the river.
PS: Don't get off! Don't get off! Don't get off!
Narrator: Paul has never seen a fossil do that.
PS: Okay, when I say three, we move. One, two, three! Whoa!
So -- there were -- (Applause) Well, you know, the -- the fossil record is truly amazing because it really forces you to look at living animals in a new way. We proved with those measurements that crocodiles scaled isometrically. It depended on the shape of their skull, though, so we had to actually get those measurements to be sure that we had reconstructed and could prove to the scientific world that supercroc in fact is a 40-foot crocodile, probably a male. Anyway, you find other things, too. I'm going to lead an expedition to the Sahara to dig up Africa's largest neolithic site. We found this last year. 200 skeletons, tools, jewelry.
This is a ceremonial disk. An amazing record of the colonization of the Sahara 5,000 years ago is been sitting out there waiting for us to go back. So, really exciting.
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隨後的工作轉到西藏,通常西藏讓我們聯想到高地,它確實是塊島洲,曾是印度的前導,岡瓦納古陸的信使,恐龍的失樂園,與世隔絕數百萬年沒有人找到,除了我們,而且明年我們就實地走訪,海拔約在13,000到14,000呎之間,挑一年中溫暖的時節去就沒問題。
我曾試著縫合恐龍演化的歷史,讓大家可以試著瞭解一些演化的基本模式,有些我已提過,但我們真的要更進一步鑽研這份巨大的分析工作,我們持續匯編以瞭解改變發生的地點與其意涵,我們必定無法預測演化的變局,但我們能從中學習到一些規則,這就是我們努力在做的事。
至於生物地理學的問題,地球陸塊一直在分離,這些生物全不諳水性,所以只有幾種選擇,陸塊分離,形成在演化樹上叉開繁衍,或如果夠聰明,成功演化為另一品種,又抹掉那分支關係,或是在這一邊平和生活,在另一邊就滅絕,你在這一邊存活下來並創造出差異。
第四種情況是你的確經歷上述任何演化,但古生物學家找不到你,這有四種情況,這又是一個複雜的問題,所以,除了挖掘,我認為有些答案來自恐龍留下的記錄。
我認為這些恐龍曾經在全球遷徙(也稱為散佈),利用脆弱的陸橋,就在極地周圍兩到三度的範圍內,保持了不同大陸間的相似性,但一旦分離之後,牠們就真的被分開了,我們發現不同大陸,形塑出恐龍的差異,有一件更重要的事,我認為是絕種。
我們以前小看了這個因素,它刻劃出生命的歷史,給出我們在恐龍世界終揭曉前所看到的差異,就在大隕石撞擊地球之前,衡量這一點的最佳方式是透過實際建模。
讓我們回頭看看這張二維的典型生命樹,我想給大家看三維圖的,這是生命樹,現在我加入面積的層面,生命樹通常隨著時間推進而分枝,這裡有隨時間推進產生的分枝,但我們再建立含面積的第三維,這是一套電腦程式,內含三個環節方便控制三項我們關心的事:絕種、取樣和散佈。
從這個面積到另一個,最後,我們能控制分枝,模仿我們認為是大陸以前的面貌,反覆操作上千次之後,我們便能估計出參數,用以回答我們是否準確的問題,至少可知道問題的障礙,這就和科學有點關係了。
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And then work later is going to take us to Tibet. Now, we normally think of Tibet as a highland. It's really an island continent. It was a precursor to India, a messenger from Gondwana -- a lost paradise of dinosaurs isolated for millions of years. No one's found them. We know where they are, and we're going to go and get them next year. They're only between 13 and 14,000 feet, but if you go in the warm part of the year, it's OK. Now, I tried to suture together a dinosaur evolutionary history so that we can try to understand some basic patterns of evolution. I've talked about a few of them. We really need to take that further. We need to delve into this mass of anatomy that we've been compiling to understand where the changes are occurring and what this means. We can't predict, necessarily, what will happen in evolution, but we can learn some of the rules of the game, and that's really what we're trying to do.
With regard to the biogeographic question, the Earth is dividing. These are all landlubbing animals. There's a couple of choices. You get divided, and a continent's division corresponds to a fork in the evolutionary tree, or you're crafty, and you manage to escape from one to the other and erase that division, or you're living peacefully on each side, and on one side you just go extinct, and you survive on the other side and create a difference. And the fourth thing is that you actually did one or the other of those three things, but the paleontologist never found you. And you take those four instances and you realize you have a complex problem. And so, in addition to digging, I think we have some answers from the dinosaur record. I think these dinosaurs migrated -- we call it dispersal -- around the globe, with the slightest land bridge. They did it within two or three degrees of the pole, to maintain similarity between continents. But when they were divided, indeed they were divided, and we do see the continents carving differences among dinosaurs.
But there's one thing that's even more important, and I think that's extinction. We have downgraded this factor. It carves up the history of life, and gives us the differences that we see in the dinosaur world towards the end, right before the bolide impact. The best way to test this is to actually create a model. So if we move back, this is a two-dimensional typical tree of life. I want to give you three dimensions. So you see the tree of life, but now I've added the dimension of area. So the tree of life is normally divergence over time. Now we have divergence over time, but we've created the third dimension of area.
This is a computer program which has three knobs. We can control those things that we're worried about: extinction, sampling, dispersal -- going from one area to another. And ultimately we can control the branching to mimic what we think the continents were like, and run it a thousand times, so we can estimate the parameters, to answer the question whether we are on the mark or not, at least to know the barriers of the problems. So that's a little bit about the science.
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今天,我用站在台上剩下的時間談談我在芝加哥所做的事,那和我從未和許多TED與會者交流這事實有關,我不確定我是否能從在座眾人中得到誠實的答案,如果我現在請你們舉手回答,但台下的確有很多人在開始自己的科學、技術或娛樂事業時,都是以失敗開場,無論是以社會或學校的標準來衡量。
至少我是如此,我對學校不滿,學校也放棄了我,誰在指責?多位老師差點殺了我,我在藝術中找回自己,我在學校時完全像個癈物,連高中畢業都有問題,但我仍堅持,這是我的第一張油畫,我還閱讀字典,進了大學,我成了藝術家並開始畫畫。
這變得抽象了,我做好作品的檔案,前往紐約,有時我會在軀體上看到骨骼,背後有些事情發生,我來到紐約的工作室,順便到訪美國博物館,之後我再也沒有復原,但實際上這是相同的道理,是同類的道理,我是說是否有任何不能形象化的就不為人所見?
就以發現恐龍骨都是從外面那一小塊開始而言,或是把看到的扭曲,試圖視為各種動物進化時的扭曲,這是不比尋常的視覺形象,我以人臉為例子,因為你們都很熟悉,我們花了多年才研究出如何處理恐龍,這兩者其實是互有關聯。
我們試圖在芝加哥創立渠道,接觸、召集那些最不被科學和科技圈子接納的學生,我們知道,也有多番間接提及,我們沒有能力培養足夠的科學家、工程師和技師,這個問題存在已久。我們已經歷過俄國人造衛星的時代,現在你看到我們加快工作步調的速度,這問題已變得更加突出,這些人才從何而來?
另一個更普遍的社會問題是這些落後的學生將來怎麼辨?那些學童像我當初在學校時,也像你們其中的一部份人,在學校時沒有機會,而且永遠都不會有機會,參與科學與科技,這些是我想提出的問題。
衣索比亞非常重要,尼日同等重要,我拼命想在尼日做一些事,他們有愛滋病的問題,所以我想問,美國國務院最近查詢尼日政府,你們有什麼想法?他們提出兩個問題,恐龍是其中之一,給我們蓋一間恐龍博物館,讓我們吸引觀光客,這是我們第二大產業。
我祈求上天、美國政府、我或是TED或其他人能幫助我們,因為這對該國是不可思義的事,但我們回來看看我們的國家,我們居住的城市,大部人居住的城市,當然包括我的城市,有眾多小孩和他們一樣,我們幾世紀以前就開始談論要如何讓小孩子參與科學。
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Today I'm going to spend the rest of my few minutes up here talking about the other stuff that I do in Chicago, which is related to the fact that I never -- and actually, in talking to a lot of TEDsters, there's a number of you out there -- I don't know that I'd get an answer honestly, if I asked you to raise your hand, but there are a number of you out there that started your scientific, technical, entertainment career as failures, by society's standards, as failures by schools. I was one of those. I was failed by my school -- my school failed me. Who's pointing fingers? Several teachers nearly killed me. I found myself in art. I was a total failure in school, not really headed to graduate high school. And I went on -- that's my first painting on canvas. I read a dictionary. I got into college. I became an artist. OK, and started drawing. It became abstract. I worked up a portfolio, and I was headed to New York. Sometimes I would see bones when there was a body there. Something was going on in the background. I headed to New York to a studio. I took a side trip to the American Museum, and I never recovered.
But really it's the same discipline -- they're kindred disciplines. I mean, is there anything that is not visualizing what can't be seen, in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that's out there, or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another? This is a very extraordinarily visual. I give you a human face because you're experts at that. It takes us years to understand how to do that with dinosaurs. They're really kindred disciplines. But what we're trying to create in Chicago is a way to get, collect together, those students who are least represented in our science and technology spheres. We all know, and there's been several allusions to it, that we are failing in our ability to produce enough scientists, engineers and technicians.
We've known that for a long time. We've gone through the Sputnik phase, and now, as you see the increase in the pace of what we're doing, it becomes even more prominent. Where are all these people going to come from? And a more general question for our society is, What's going to happen to all the rest that are left behind? What about all the kids like me that were in school -- kids like some of you out there -- that were in school and didn't get a chance and will never get a chance to participate in science and technology?
Those are the questions I ask. And we talk about Ethiopia, and it's very important. Niger is equally important, and I'm trying desperately to do something in Niger. They have an AIDS problem. I asked -- the U.S. State Department asked the government recently, What do you want to do? And they gave them two problems. Dinosaurs was one of them. Give us a museum of dinosaurs, and we will attract tourists, which is our number two industry. And I hope to god the United States government, me, or TED, or somebody helps us do that, because that would be an incredible thing for their country. But when we look back at our own country, we're looking back at our cities, the cities where most of you come from -- certainly the city I come from -- there's legions of kids out there like these. And the question is -- and we started to address this question for centuries -- as to how we get these kids involved in science.
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在芝加哥我們成立了一個組織,非營利的組織,名為「探索計劃」。這是「探索計劃」的兩個學員,我們在他們高中時期認識他們,他們曾是成績不理想的學生,但現在一位就讀芝加哥大學,另一位在伊利諾州大學,還有其他學員上了哈佛,組織現在六歲了。
我們一直在追蹤記錄,因為你到外面是一位學者,想做縱貫性研究,這樣的追蹤記錄不是沒有就是不常見,我們創造了100%畢業的亮眼記錄,90%進入大學,很多是第一代移民,其中90%選擇了科學作為職業,這是很漂亮的記錄。
我們反思一開始時我們也沒有確實按理論走,但現在回顧科學教育的理論式運動也是透過調查的方式來探討科學,這是很大的進展,然後Dewey實用主義回到芝加哥,我們邊做邊學,將自已想像成為科學家來學習,然後學習想像自已是科學家,下一步就是學習讓自己,真正成為科學家的能力。
這些是必經步驟,讓小孩子對科學感興趣很容易,但要讓他們將自已想像是科學家很困難,因為那包括像在這場座談會一樣站在眾人面前,以知識份子的身份報告一些東西,最後發現自己的身份是科學家,並開始利用工具達成夢想。
所以,我們現在要做的是在芝加哥規劃一間永遠的家,我們有很多想法,但有一件事情是確定的,我也已和TED的一些人談過,這個家將會是前所未見,有點像學校、有點像博物館、有點像溫室、有點像動物園,即如何讓小孩子對科學感興趣,這是答案的部份。
謝謝各位。
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We've started in Chicago an organization -- a non-profit organization -- called Project Exploration. These are two kids from Project Exploration. We met them in their early stages in high school. They were -- failing to poor students, and they are now -- one at the University of Chicago, another in Illinois. We've got students at Harvard. We're six years old. And we created a track record. Because when you go out there as a scholar, and you try to find out longitudinal studies, track records like that, there essentially are very few, if none. So, we've created an incredible track record of 100 percent graduation, 90 percent going to college, many first-generation, 90 percent of those choosing science as a career. It's an impressive track record, and so we look back and we say, well, we didn't really exactly work this out theoretically from the start, but when we look back, there are theoretical movements in science education.
It's gone through science as an inquiry, which was a big advance, and Dewey back at Chicago -- you learn by doing. To -- you learn by envisioning yourself as a scientist, and then you learn to envision yourself as a scientist. The next step is to learn the capability to make yourself a scientist. You have to have those steps. If you have -- It's easy to get kids interested in science. It's hard to get them to envision themselves as a scientist, which involves standing up in front of people like we're doing here at this symposium and presenting something as a knowledgeable person, and then seeing yourself in the role as a scientist and giving yourself the tools to pursue that.
And so, that's what we're going to do. We're planning a permanent home in Chicago. We have lots of ideas, but I guarantee you this one thing -- and I've talked to some people here at TED -- it's not going to look like anything you've seen before. It's going to be part-school, part-museum hall, part-conservatory, part-zoo, and part of an answer to the problem of how you interest kids in science. Thank you very much.