万物简史 第442期:小生物的世界(13)

 　　A lot of little organisms that looked like bacteria and behaved like bacteria were actually something else altogether, 许多小生物看上去像细菌，表现得像细菌，实际上完全是另一类东西，

　　something that had branched off from bacteria a long time ago. 那类东西很久以前已经从细菌中分离出去。

　　Woese called these organisms archaebacteria, later shortened to archaea. 沃斯把这种微生物叫做原始细菌。

　　It has be said that the attributes that distinguish archaea from bacteria are not the sort that would quicken the pulse of any but a biologist. 不是不说，原始细菌区别于细菌的特性只会令生物学家感到激动。

　　They are mostly differences in their lipids and an absence of something called peptidoglycan. 这些特性大多体现在脂质的不同，还缺少一种名叫肽聚糖的东西。

　　But in practice they make a world of difference. 而实际上，这就构成了天壤之别。

　　Archaeans are more different from bacteria than you and I are from a crab¹ or spider. 原始细菌对于细菌，比之你和我对于螃蟹或蜘蛛还要不同。

　　Singlehandedly Woese had discovered an unsuspected division of life, 沃斯独自一人发现了一种未知的基本生命种类。

　　so fundamental that it stood above the level of kingdom at the apogee² of the Universal Tree of Life, as it is rather reverentially known. 它高于“界”的层面，位于被相当尊敬地称之为世界生命之巅的地方。

　　In 1976, he startled the world—or at least the little bit of it that was paying attention—by redrawing the tree of life to incorporate not five main divisions, but twenty-three. 1976年，他重绘了生命树，包括了不是5个而是23个主要“部”，令世界——至少令关注这件事的少部分人——大吃一惊。

　　These he grouped under three new principal categories—Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya—which he called domains³. 他把这些部归在他称之为“域”的3个新的主要类别下面——细菌、原始细菌和真核细菌。

　　Woese's new divisions did not take the biological world by storm. 沃斯的新的分类法在生物学界没有引起轰动。

　　Some dismissed them as much too heavily weighted toward the microbial. 有的人对他的体系不屑一顾，认为它过于分偏向于微生物。

　　Many just ignored them. 许多人完全不予理睬。

　　Woese, according to Frances Ashcroft, "felt bitterly disappointed." 据弗朗西斯·阿什克拉夫特说，沃斯“感到极其失望”。

　　But slowly his new scheme began to catch on among microbiologists. 但是，他的新方案渐渐开始被微生物学家们接受。

1 crab   

n.螃蟹，偏航，脾气乖戾的人，酸苹果；vi.捕蟹，偏航，发牢骚；vt.使偏航，发脾气

参考例句：

• I can't remember when I last had crab.我不记得上次吃蟹是什么时候了。
• The skin on my face felt as hard as a crab's back.我脸上的皮仿佛僵硬了，就象螃蟹的壳似的。

2 apogee   

n.远地点；极点；顶点

参考例句：

• The orbit of the artificial satellite has an apogee of 200 miles from the earth.这个人造卫星的轨道，其最远点在离地球200英里的地方。
• Apogean tides occur when the moon is at the apogee of its orbit.远月潮在月球位于其轨道的最远点时发生。

3 domains   

n.范围( domain的名词复数 )；领域；版图；地产

参考例句：

• The theory of thermodynamics links the macroscopic and submicroscopic domains. 热力学把宏观世界同亚微观世界联系起来。 来自辞典例句
• All three flow domains are indicated by shading. 所有三个流动区域都是用阴影部分表示的。 来自辞典例句