英语专八2018听力讲座来源（TED演讲）
英语专业八级考试中的听力讲座题，近三年的选材主要来自TED演讲。
座谈会方案及议程
现在，我们向大家介绍2018年专八听力讲座的材料来源——英国雷丁大学的进化生物学家Mark Pagel在TED上的演讲“How language transformed humanity开学第一课讲话稿（语言如何改变人类）”。
不同近义词>追根问底
2018年专八听力讲座来源
考卷
家访心得体会
生物学家马克·佩格尔与我们分享了一个关于人类如何发展复杂的语言系统的有趣理论。他认为，语言是一种社会技术，它帮助人类早期部落获得了一个强有力的新工具：合作。
【TED演讲】
How language transformed humanity
语言如何改变人类
Transcript:
Each of you posss the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural lection has ever devid. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language, of cour, becau it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone el's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. It's just that, whereas that device relies on puls of infrared light, your language relies on puls, discrete puls, of sound.
当当网电子书And just as you u the remote control device to alter the internal ttings of your television to suit your mood, you u your language to alter the ttings inside someone el's brain to suit your interests. Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. And just imagine the n of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth.
Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phras you can't u and words you can't say. In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confud them by giving them different languages. And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. Even today, we know that there are words we cannot u, phras we cannot say, becau if we do so, we might be accosted, jailed, or even killed. And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths.
Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there's something worth explaining. And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? Now it's a little bit of a surpri that to get an answer to that question,
we have to go to tool u in the chimpanzees. Now the chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. But if they really were intelligent, why would they u a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody el had already cracked open for them? Why not? I mean, that's what we do.
Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. They em to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. As a result, they can't improve on others'ideas or learn from others' mistakes — benefit from others' wisdom. And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and the chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts.
Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris. How do we know this? Becau this i
s exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. The upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago, and they made the splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. But if we look at the fossil record, we e that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years. You can follow it through the fossil record. Now if we make some guess about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. It's not even clear that our very clo genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than tho of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that tho species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia.
Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, 'monkey e, monkey do,' the surpri really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that — at least not very much. And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it — something from a Barnum & Bailey circus.永爱
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But by comparison, we can learn. We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. We can then choo, from among a range of options, the best one. We can benefit from others' ideas. We can build on their wisdom. And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progress. And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And all of this becau of cumulative cultural adaptation. The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you — all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation.
