In less than four decades, Mr. Last claims we will live longer, have children in old age and rely on artificial intelligence to do ordinary and boring tasks. This shift is so significant, he claims, it is comparable to the change from monkeys to apes, and apes to humans. “Your 80 or 100 is going to be so radically different than your grandparents,” Mr. Last says, who believes we will spend much of our time living in virtual reality. Some evolutionary scientists believe this age could be as high as 120 by 2050.
Mr. Last claims humans will also demonstrate
Instead of living fast and dying younger, Mr. Last believes humans will live slow and die old. “Global society at the moment is a complete mess,” he told MailOnline. “But in crisis there is opportunity, and in apocalypse (启示) there can be transformation. So I think the next system humanity creates will be far more sophisticated, fair, and abundant than our current civilization.”
“I think our next system will be as different from the modern world, as our contemporary world is from the medieval (中世纪的) world. The biological clock isn't going to be around forever,” he added, and said that people could pause it for some time using future technology.
The change is already happening. Today, the average age at which a woman in Britain has her first baby has been rising steadily stands at 29. 8. In the US, just one percent of first children were born to women over the age of 35 in 1970. By 2012, that figure rose to 15 percent.
“As countries become socio-economically advanced, more and more people, especially women have the option to engage in cultural reproduction,” Mr. Last added. And as well as having more child-free years to enjoy leisure time, he believes artificial intelligence will make up the need for low-skill jobs. We may also spend a large amount of time living in virtual reality. “I’m not quite sure most people have really absorbed the implications of this possibility,” Mr. Last said.
His views are detailed in a paper, titled “Human Evolution, Life History Theory, and the End of Biological Reproduction" published Current Aging Science.
【小题1】According to Cadell Last, a completely new type of human will appear because of ______.
① artificial intelligence ② new technology ③ natural selection ④ mundane tasks
⑤ behavior
| A．②③⑤ | B．①②③ | C．③④⑤ | D．①②⑤ |
| A．We have diseases and die young. |
| B．We spend less time in virtual reality. |
| C．We give birth to a child when we are young. |
| D．We use intelligent robots to do everyday housework. |
| A．Reproduction. |
| B．Reproduce less. |
| C．Natural selection shapes key events. |
| D．Organisms need more energy and time to ripen. |
| A．women are engaged in careers or hobbies instead of giving birth to babies |
| B．women are engaged in playing computer games rather than working |
| C．women are engaged in cultural reproduction in place of men |
| D．women are engaged in living in virtual reality without options |
How old is “old” ?
How old is “old” ?
So, how old is old? The answer is one you’ve heard many times, from all sorts of people. “You are as old (or young) as you feel!” The calendar(日历) simply tells you how many years you have lived.
Once an unknown author wrote , “
There are many wrong ideas about aging.
| A．Old is a point of view. |
| B．It’s extremely terrible to be grown old. |
| C．The answer has changed over the years. |
| D．Your body tells you how well you’ve lived. |
| E．Older people are stubborn, unable to change. |
| F．Youth is not a time of life but it is a state of mind. |
| G．These ideas stereotype (固化) people on the basis of age. |
Maybe you’ve wondered what you would hear if plants could speak. There is no need to wonder any longer. Ariel Novoplansky, an ecologist in Israel, set up an experiment among pea plants to study how they communicate with each other.
In the experiments, Ariel put peas in rows of containers. The Center plant in the row was the target. The pea plants had been grown with two main roots. On one side, each pea plant had one root in its own pot and the other reaching into a neighbor’s pot. The central plant connected to its closest neighbor, which connected to another neighbor, and so on down the line. On the other side, all the plants kept their roots in their own pots, unconnected to their neighbors.
With everything ready, the ecologist created a dryness for the central target plant, which had quickly closed up its leaf pores (气孔) to save water. Amazingly, six connected plants on one side gradually closed up their leaf pores, even though only one of them had experienced real dryness. On the other side, with unconnected roots pea chain, all their pores stayed open. This means the warning signal didn’t travel from the stressed plants leaves through the air, but only from its roots through the soil.
It’s possible that plants are just eavesdropping (偷听) even if the damaged plant didn’t mean to send signals to them. Maybe the damaged plant leaks certain chemicals and nearby roots could sense those signals. But the plants with connected roots that weren’t dried out passed on the drought signals to their neighbors too, which means simple eavesdropping probably isn’t the answer. They seem to be having a real conversation, picking up information on one side and sharing it with a neighbor on the other.
The benefit to a plant that receives this information is pretty clear. Your neighbor may actually be you. The plants may not be speaking with any volume, but don’t let that fool you. They around us are saying plenty.
【小题1】Which aspect of the experiment is mainly talked about in paragraph 2?| A．Its finding | B．Its design. | C．Its purpose. | D．Its application. |
| A．By connecting the roots. | B．By opening their leaf pores. |
| C．By leaking certain chemicals. | D．By spreading a special smell. |
| A．Complex. | B．Cooperative. | C．Efficient. | D．Mysterious. |
| A．Helping their neighbors grow. | B．Developing their roots system. |
| C．Improving their living condition. | D．Protecting the plants and themselves. |
“We don’t know what that means to long-term health and certain diseases yet,” says Heather Stapleton, one of the study’s authors. But she notes that her team’s findings also raise a question of whether pollutants in dust might play some role in the growing, global problem of obesity (肥胖).
Stapleton and her colleagues collected dust from homes and offices. Studies found that some materials in the dust could turn on a protein (蛋白质) called PPAR-gamma 1. It’s found in many human tissues. Turning this protein on can cause fat cells to grow. Researchers think this protein may be involved in obesity. But a second study now finds evidence that certain fats are mostly to blame. Cooking oils may send out some of these fats into the air, where they eventually find their way into house dust. Or, the authors say, the fats might enter house dust as part of the hair or skin cells shed (脱落) by people or pets.
“While the findings are amazing,” says Mitchell Lazar, another study author, “these findings need to be taken as very limited.” Indeed, he adds several cautions about how the findings should be understood. “For one thing, people eat these fats in foods all of the time. That is likely to be a lot more than would be consumed from indoor dust,” he said.
【小题1】What do we know about PPAR-gamma 1? _____
| A．It comes from dust. |
| B．It leads to weight gain. |
| C．It can help get rid of dust. |
| D．It only appears in human bodies. |
| A．Can house dust make us fat? |
| B．Why is it important to clean? |
| C．Anything to do to deal with dust? |
| D．What is the best way to lose weight? |
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