【经济学人】脑容量较小的鸟类容易发生交通事故丨2017.03.30丨总第856期

NATURAL selection is a harsh interrogator at the best of times. But if you are a bird, it has an extra question, not asked so forcefully of animals that cannot fly: “is that extra gram of weight really necessary?” Contrary to the insult “bird-brained”, birds are not notably more stupid than mammals, but the pressure to keep organs light applies to the cerebrum as much as it does to anything else.（读者试译句）

自然选择即使在最好情况下也表现得十分严苛。但如果你是一只鸟，与其他不能飞行的动物相比，你有一个额外的问题需要考虑即如何尽可能减少累赘。 （期待您的翻译，明天会有针对这句话的长难句解析哟~）

• Bird-brained：adj. 愚蠢的

• Mammals：n. 哺乳类；哺乳类动物

• Cerebrum：n. 大脑

For the past century, though, birds have faced a new enemy that might require them to get smarter: the motor car. These days, cars and other motorised vehicles kill around 250m birds a year. That sounds like a significant selective pressure, so Anders Moller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Sud, in France, decided to find out whether it really was.

在上个世纪，鸟类遇到了一个新的敌人——汽车。这令它们需要变得聪明些，因为每年因汽车和其他机动车辆而丧命的鸟类数量约为2.5亿。选择压力听上去如此之大，这令法国巴黎南大学的进化生物学家Anders Moller决定一探究竟。

Dr Moller’s hypothesis was that avoiding vehicles needs intelligence, and intelligence needs a big brain. The conclusion of this syllogism is that small-brained birds are more likely to be road-kill than large-brained birds are. To test this idea, though, he needed data on a lot of dead birds.

Moller博士猜想，规避汽车需要一定的智力，而一定的智力则意味着大脑要足够大。这一系列推论的结果是，脑容量较小的鸟类比脑容量较大的鸟类更容易因车祸而丧命。为了测试这一观点，他需要大量的鸟类尸体数据。