双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第9章:退隐山林(80)
Already there had been a hint in Intelligent Machinery, for Sir Charles Darwin's benefit:
The picture of the cortex as an unorganised machine is very satisfactory from the point of view of evolution and genetics.
从进化论和基因学的角度看，大脑皮层是一种非常优越的无组织机器。It clearly would not require any very complex system of genes to produce something like the ... unorganised machine.
很明显，这种类似于……无组织机器的东西，不需要非常复杂的基因系统来构建。
In fact this should be much easier than the production of such things as the respiratory centre. ...
实际上，这比构建呼吸系统要容易得多……Somehow the brain did it, and somehow brains came into being every day without all the fuss and bother of the minnow-brained ACE.
大脑不知怎么就做到了，大脑时时刻刻都这样存在着，不需要像ACE那样费心费力。There were two possibilities: either a brain learnt to think by dint of interaction with the world, or else it had something written in it at birth—which must be programmed, in a looser sense, by the genes.
这有两种可能性，要么是大脑通过与世界的交互而学会思考，要么是大脑在诞生之初就规定了某种东西——某种程序，由基因编写的程序。Brains were too complicated to consider at first. But how did anything know how to grow?
直接研究大脑，似乎太复杂了，那么其它东西，是如何知道自己该如何生长的？There lay the question—a question that the smallest child could ask, and the question that Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know had placed at the centre.
这是个问题，这是每个孩子都会问的问题，也是《自然奇迹》的中心问题。When embarking upon the delicate subject of 'what little boys and girls are really made of', E.T. Brewster had launched into a description of the growth of starfish, beginning with the young egg, before there is any sign of a growing creature inside.
当谈到微妙的"男孩和女孩究竟是如何造出来的"时，布鲁斯特以海星的成长为引，这样写道：首先是一个小蛋，看不出任何成长的迹象。One would perhaps expect to see the oil and jelly mixture change gradually into a star-fish.
可能有人会希望这些油状物和胶状物能逐渐长成海星。Instead of this, however, this little balloon-like affair splits squarely into two, and makes two little balloons just alike, and which lie side by side.
但实际却不是这样。这个小蛋一样的东西会分裂成两个，变成两个相同的小蛋，挨在一起……... In about half an hour, each of these balloons or bubbles, 'cells' as they have come to be called, has divided again; so that now there are four. The four soon become eight; the eight, sixteen.
大约半小时后，每个小蛋，现在叫作"细胞"，会再次分裂，变成4个。这4个很快又会变成8个，8个变成16个。
