雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第9章:退隱山林(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.
從進化論和基因學的角度看，大腦皮層是一種非常優越的無組織機器。It clearly would not require any very complex system of genes to produce something like the ... unorganised machine.
很明顯，這種類似於……無組織機器的東西，不需要非常複雜的基因系統來構建。
In fact this should be much easier than the production of such things as the respiratory centre. ...
實際上，這比構建呼吸系統要容易得多……Somehow the brain did it, and somehow brains came into being every day without all the fuss and bother of the minnow-brained ACE.
大腦不知怎麼就做到了，大腦時時刻刻都這樣存在着，不需要像ACE那樣費心費力。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.
這有兩種可能性，要麼是大腦通過與世界的交互而學會思考，要麼是大腦在誕生之初就規定了某種東西——某種程序，由基因編寫的程序。Brains were too complicated to consider at first. But how did anything know how to grow?
直接研究大腦，似乎太複雜了，那麼其它東西，是如何知道自己該如何生長的？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.
這是個問題，這是每個孩子都會問的問題，也是《自然奇蹟》的中心問題。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.
當談到微妙的"男孩和女孩究竟是如何造出來的"時，布魯斯特以海星的成長爲引，這樣寫道：首先是一個小蛋，看不出任何成長的跡象。One would perhaps expect to see the oil and jelly mixture change gradually into a star-fish.
可能有人會希望這些油狀物和膠狀物能逐漸長成海星。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.
但實際卻不是這樣。這個小蛋一樣的東西會分裂成兩個，變成兩個相同的小蛋，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.
大約半小時後，每個小蛋，現在叫作"細胞"，會再次分裂，變成4個。這4個很快又會變成8個，8個變成16個。
