加州大学洛杉矶分校的Steven Cole认为他可能知道这是为什么。他在华盛顿特区举办的美国科学促进会大会上展示了他对孤独的人的基因表达所做的研究。Cole博士收集了孤独之人和爱交际之人的白细胞样品。然后他分析了他们基因的活性——靠测量信使RNA的多少。这种分子携带着基因上的指令，告诉细胞合成那类蛋白质。在这两种人中，大多数基因的信使RNA的水平是一样的。然而有些基因在孤独之人中活力较弱，同时另外一些基因却活力较高。而且，无论是活力较高的基因还是活力较低的基因都来自少数功能群。
Broadly speaking, the genes less active in the lonely were those involved in staving off viralinfections. Those that were more active were involved in protecting against bacteria. Dr Cole suspects this could help explain not only why the lonely are iller, but how, in evolutionaryterms, this odd state of affairs has come about. For inflammation is an antibacterial response.
一般来说，孤独的人体内活力较低的基因是那些帮助人们避开病毒感染的基因。而那些活力较高的基因帮助人们抵抗细菌。Cole博士怀疑这不但能够解释为什么孤独之人容易得病，而且能从进化的角度这种奇怪的状态时怎么进化来的。因为炎症反应时抵抗细菌的反应。
The crucial bit of the puzzle is that viruses have to be caught from another infected individual and they are usually species-specific. Bacteria, in contrast, often just lurk in theenvironment (like tetanus), and may thrive on many hosts (as does bubonic plague, for example). The gregarious are therefore at greater risk than the lonely of catching viruses, and Dr Cole thus suggests that past evolution has created a mechanism (the details of which remain unclear) which causes white cells to respond appropriately. Conversely, the lonely are better off ramping up their protection against bacterial infection, which is a bigger relative risk to them.
这个问题的关键点是，病毒必须从另外一个已经感染此病毒的身上感染另一个人，并且病毒通常有其一对一的特殊宿主。细菌却相反，它们潜伏在周围环境中(像是破伤风杆菌)，并且宿主众多(比如说黑死病)。因而爱交际的人比孤独之人更易感染病毒。因此Cole博士认为进化过程创造出了一种机制(细节仍不清楚)，可以让白细胞对这一状况进行反应。相反，孤独之人更善于加强他们对细菌感染的保护反应，这对他们来说是一个相对更大的风险。
What Dr Cole seems to have revealed, then, is a mechanism by which the environment (in this case the social environment) reaches inside a person's body and tweaks its genome so that it responds appropriately. It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other. Rather, their genes are regulated differently, according to how sociable an individual is. Dr Cole thinks this regulation is part of a wider mechanism that tunes individuals to the circumstances they find themselves in. Where it goes wrong is when loneliness becomeschronic, and the inflammatory response becomes chronic a the same time.
Cole博士想要揭示的是这样一种机制：环境(在这里是社交环境)可以影响人们体内的生化活动，调整人体内的基因组以让其做出合适的反应。并不是说孤独之人和爱交际之人在基因上彼此不同。而是他们根据个人对交际喜爱的程度不同，各自以不同的方式调控各自的基因。Cole博士认为这种调节是一种更广泛的让个人适应他们所在环境的机制中的一部分。当孤独的生活状态变成一种常态，问题就出现了——炎症反应同时也变成常态了(成了慢性疾病)。
Before civilisation intervened, such chronic loneliness would have been s rare (becauseisolated individuals are so vulnerable to predation) that evolution would have ignored it. Now,paradoxically, the large population that civilisation makes possible means loneliness iscommonplace—and with it consequences that natural selection, which is blind to the future, has not yet had time to deal with.
在文明到来之前，这种常态性的孤独非常罕见(因为单独的个体易被捕食)，进化就把它忽略了。现在，自相矛盾地，文明使得人口众多成为可能，意味着孤独状态成为常事——在这种情况下看不清未来的自然选择的后果还来不及去应付。
相关推荐：英语2013六级翻译的解题技巧