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  3. Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to pre

Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to pre

游客2024-06-05  24
问题     Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to preserve rare species, whether for cultural or for scientific reasons. Some people indeed are actively hostile. Species have been dying out since life began, they argue, and have continuously been replaced by new species. Why, therefore, should we interfere with the process? Let us abandon to their fate the great Indian rhinoceros, the Arabian ostrich, the Tasmanian wolf, and all those other animals that cannot adapt themselves to the modern world. Others will arise to take their place.
    But, of course, this argument has got its time-scale all wrong, It would take millions of years to evolve a set of new species to replace those we are now losing. In the meantime the world is filling up with the hardy and adaptable pests, rats and rabbits, starlings and house sparrows. The cultural argument for preserving wild life, that it is part of our natural heritage, argues itself, except to those who are blind to cultural values anyway, what is less obvious and more in need of explanation is the scientific case for preventing the extirpation of rare species.
    In these days of torrential achievement in the physical sciences we are apt to forget that it is possible only because most of the basic thinking in the sciences has already been done. The seed has been sown and the fruit is now being harvested. Could that basic thinking have been brought to so triumphant a conclusion so early if the raw material, the fundamental physical phenomena, had been subjected to the sort of erosion and extinction that today constantly threatens the raw material of the biological sciences? Supposing the world stock of radium had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk by 1850. Who at that early date could have put up a sound argument in favor of conserving it if it had been known and in danger of destruction?
    It is just this danger which now confronts the biological sciences, whose basic thinking is by no means yet done, but which hold the key to man’s achievement of a satisfactory mastery over both his nature and his nurture in the coming centuries. Animal and plants species are natural experiments in genetics and adaptation to environment that have taken millions of years to work out. Research as we may with fruit-flies, we can never catch up with nature. We have not the time. Is it not therefore folly to allow our vital experimental material to vanish through carelessness? [br] In Paragraph 3, "had gone by the way of the dodo" means ______.
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答案 had faced the threat of destruction like the dodo
解析 文章第三段提到“dodo”，回答这一问题，要能理解第三段的最后几句；若在材料科学的历史上，其研究的原材料像今天生物学研究的原材料一样受到被灭绝的危险，材料科学上的许多基本思想也许就不能被建立，那么今天的物质科学研究也不可能会有如此辉煌的成就。第三段用物质科学和生物学来作类比，若镭元素像渡渡鸟一样在1850年濒临毁灭，又有谁会想出来保护镭元素呢，就算它当时已被发现(1850年镭元素还未被发现，就算被发现，当时的科学水平也不能认识到保护此元素的重要性，就像渡渡鸟一样，渡渡鸟已经灭绝，我们再也不可能知道它在生物学研究上可能占有的重要地位)。
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