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演讲MP3+双语文稿:真菌对市场经济学的启示

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2022年09月28日

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听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿,供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:真菌对市场经济学的启示,希望你会喜欢!

【演讲者及介绍】Toby Kiers

生物行为科学家基尔获得了加州大学戴维斯分校的博士学位,现在是荷兰VU阿姆斯特丹的进化生物学教授。她在中美洲、非洲、亚洲、欧洲和北美进行了研究,并积极参与全球农业政策和保护工作。

【演讲主题】真菌对市场和经济学的启示

【中英文字幕】

翻译者 psjmz mz 校对者 Jiasi Hao

So I stand before you as an evolutionarybiologist, a professor of evolutionary biology, which sounds like a ratherfancy title, if I may say so myself. And I'm going to talk about two topicsthat aren't normally talked about together, and that's market economies andfungi. Or is it fun-GUY, or, as we say in Europe now, fun-GEE? There's still noconsensus on how to say this word.

我作为进化生物学家站在你们面前, 进化生物学教授, 这个头衔听起来很花哨, 如果我可以如此自称的话。 我要打算讨论两个 通常不被放在一起讨论的话题, 那就是市场经济和真菌。 (英语发音)或叫“番菌( fun-GUY)”,或在欧洲的读法,“番基(fun-GEE)“?人们尚未对这个词的发音取得共识。

So I want you to imagine a market economythat's 400 million years old, one that's so ubiquitous that it operates inalmost every ecosystem of the world, so huge that it can connect millions oftraders simultaneously, and so persistent that it survived mass extinctions.It's here, right now, under our feet. You just can't see it. And unlike humaneconomies that rely on cognition to make decisions, traders in this market,they beg, borrow, steal, cheat, all in the absence of thought.

我想让你们想象一个长达4亿年之久的市场经济, 这种市场经济无处不在地存在 世界上的每一个生态系统中, 它庞大到能够同时且持久地连接 数百万的交易方 它顽强到可从数场大灭绝中生存下来。 它就在这里,就在此刻,在我们脚下。 你只是看不见。 跟人类市场经济 依靠认知来做决定不同, 这个市场中的交易员, 它们乞讨,借取,偷窃,欺骗, 全都在无思想的情况下发生。

So hidden from our eyes, plant roots arecolonized by a fungus called arbuscule mycorrhizae. Now the fungus forms thesecomplex networks underground of fine filaments thinner than even threads ofcotton. So follow one of these fungi, and it connects multiple plantssimultaneously. You can think of it as an underground subway system, where eachroot is a station, where resources are loaded and unloaded. And it's also verydense, so roughly the length of many meters, even a kilometer, in a single gramof dirt. So that's the length of 10 football fields in just a thimbleful of soil.And it's everywhere. So if you passed over a tree, a shrub, a vine, even a tinyweed, you passed over a mycorrhizal network. Roughly 80 percent of all plantspecies are associated with these mycorrhizal fungi.

隐藏在我们的眼皮底下,植物的根茎被一种叫做丛枝菌根的真菌定殖。现在真菌在地下形成的这些复杂网络, 它们的这些细丝比棉线还细。 所以顺着其中一种真菌, 它同时连接着多个植物。 你可以把它想成地下铁系统, 每个根是一个站, 在那里资源被装载和卸载。 并且它非常紧密, 在一克土里,大概有几米长, 甚至一公里长。 在一丁点的土壤里, 真菌网络细丝 就有10个足球场长。 并且它无处不在。 所以如果你经过一棵树,一片灌木, 一条藤蔓,甚至是一棵小草, 你就穿越过了一个菌根网络。 大概 80% 的植物品种 与这些菌根真菌连接。

So what does a root covered in fungi haveto do with our global economy? And why as an evolutionary biologist have Ispent the last 10 years of my life learning economic jargon? Well, the firstthing you need to understand is that trade deals made by plant and fungalpartners are surprisingly similar to those made by us, but perhaps even morestrategic. You see, plant and fungal partners, they're not exchanging stocksand bonds, they're exchanging essential resources, and for the fungus, that'ssugars and fats. It gets all of its carbon directly from the plant partner. Somuch carbon, so every year, roughly five billion tons of carbon from plants gointo this network underground. For the root, what they need is phosphorus andnitrogen, so by exchanging their carbon they get access to all of the nutrientscollected by that fungal network. So to make the trade, the fungus penetratesinto the root cell of the host and forms a tiny structure called an arbuscule,which is Latin for "little tree." Now, you can think of this as thephysical stock exchange of the trade market.

那么被真菌覆盖的根茎和我们全球经济有什么关系?我这个进化生物学家为什么要花过去 10 年来研究经济学术语?你需要理解的第一件事是植物和真菌合作伙伴达成的贸易协议 和我们人类制定的贸易协定 非常相似, 但或许更具策略性。 你看,植物和真菌合作伙伴, 它们不交易股票和证券, 它们交换重要的资源。 对于真菌而言,那是糖和脂肪。 它所有的碳源都是直接从 植物伙伴那里获得的。 如此大量的碳, 以至于每年,有大约 50 亿吨的碳 从植物进入到这个地下网络。 对根茎而言,它们需要的是磷和氮, 因此,通过交换它们的碳, 它们能够获得真菌网络 收集的所有营养。 所以为了达成交易, 真菌渗透到宿主的根细胞中 形成一个叫做丛枝的微小结构, 在拉丁语中是“小树”的意思。 现在,你可以把这个想成 贸易市场中的实体的 证券交易所。

So up until now, it seems very harmonious.Right? I scratch your back, you scratch mine, both partners get what they need.But here is where we need to pause and understand the power of evolution andnatural selection. You see, there's no room for amateur traders on this market.Making the right trade strategy determines who lives and who dies.

所以到目前为止,一切看似都很和谐。对吧?我给你挠挠背,你也给我挠挠, 双方都各得所需。 但这里我们需要暂停一下, 来了解进化和自然选择的力量。 在这个市场可没有 业余交易员的位置。 正确交易策略的制定 决定着谁活谁死。

Now, I use the word strategy, but of courseplant and fungi, they don't have brains. They're making these exchanges in theabsence of anything that we would consider as thought. But, as scientists, weuse behavioral terms such as strategy to describe behaviors to certainconditions, actions and reactions that are actually programmed into the DNA ofthe organism.

现在,我使用“策略”这个词,但当然植物和真菌,它们没有大脑。 它们的这些策略 是在我们认为的认知缺失 的情况下制定出的。 但,作为科学家, 我们使用行为术语, 诸如“策略” 来描述特定情况下 被编入生物体 DNA 的 行为,动作和反应。

So I started studying these tradestrategies when I was 19 years old and I was living in the tropical rainforestsof Panama. Now, everybody at the time was interested in this incredible diversityaboveground. And it was hyperdiversity. These are tropical rainforests. But Iwas interested in the complexity belowground. We knew that the networksexisted, and we knew they were important, and I'm going to say it again, byimportant I mean important, so the basis of all plant nutrition for all thediversity that you do see aboveground. But at the time, we didn't know howthese networks worked. We didn't know how they functioned. Why did only certainplants interact with certain fungi? So fast-forward to when I started my owngroup, and we really began to play with this trade market. You see, we wouldmanipulate conditions. We would create a good trading partner by growing aplant in the sun and a poor trading partner by growing it in the shade. Wewould then connect these with a fungal network. And we found that the fungiwere consistently good at discriminating among good and bad trading partners.They would allocate more resources to the host plant giving them more carbon.

我是在 19 岁的时候开始研究这些交易策略的,我当时住在巴拿马的热带雨林。在当时,每个人都对地面上的这种令人惊诧的多样性而感兴趣。它确实极其多样。这些可是热带雨林。但我的兴趣, 却在于地下的复杂性。 我们知道这些网络的存在, 我们知道它们很重要, 并且我要再说一次, “重要”我的意思是重要, 是你在地面上看到的 所有多样植物的营养基础。 但那时,我们不知道 这些网络是如何运作的。 我们不知道它们是如何起作用的。 为什么只有特定的植物 会和特定的真菌交互。 所以快进到我成立小组的时候, 于是我们真正开始涉足 这个交易网络。 你看,我们会操纵条件。 我们会把植物种在阳光下 来创建一位良好的交易伙伴, 也会在阴暗环境中种植植物, 以创建一位糟糕的交易伙伴。 我们然后将这些植物跟 一个真菌网络连接。 我们发现:真菌一直很擅长 识别贸易伙伴的好坏。 它们会分配更多的资源给 能回馈自己更多碳的寄主植物。

Now, we would run the reciprocalexperiments where we would inoculate a host plant with good and bad fungi, andthey were also good at discriminating between these trade partners. So what youhave there is the perfect conditions for a market to emerge. It's a simplemarket, but it's a market nonetheless, where the better trading partner isconsistently favored.

如今,我们也进行了交互实验,让宿主植物接种有益菌和有害菌,我们发现:它们也非常擅长区分交易伙伴。 这里有着市场出现的完美条件。 这是个简单的市场, 但它仍然是个市场, 在这个市场中, 更好的交易伙伴总是受到偏爱。

But is it a fair market? Now this is whereyou need to understand that, like humans, plants and fungi are incrediblyopportunistic. There's evidence that the fungus, once it penetrates into theplant cell, it can actually hijack the plant's own nutrient uptake system. Itdoes this by suppressing the plant's own ability to take up nutrients from thesoil. So this creates a dependency of the plant on the fungus. It's a falseaddiction, of sorts, whereby the plant has to feed the fungus just to getaccess to the resources right around its own root. There's also evidence thatthe fungi are good at inflating the price of nutrients. They do this byextracting the nutrients from the soil, but then rather than trading them withthe host, they hoard them in their network, so this makes them unavailable tothe plant and other competing fungi. So basic economics, as resourceavailability goes down, the value goes up. The plant is forced to pay more forthe same amount of resources.

但这是个公平的市场吗?现在这是你需要理解的,跟人类类似, 植物和真菌都是不可思议的 机会主义者。 有证据表明,真菌一旦 它渗透进植物细胞中, 它其实会劫持植物自己 的营养摄取系统。 它通过抑制植物自身 从土壤中吸收养分的能力 来做到这一点。 于是这造成了植物对真菌的依赖。 这有点是那种虚假的上瘾, 也就是说,植物必须为真菌提供养料, 才能获得自己根茎周围的营养资源。 也有证据表明,真菌很擅长 抬高营养物质的价格。 通过吸收土壤中的养分, 它们并不选择与其跟宿主交换, 而是将养分存储在自己的网络中, 这就使植物和其他竞争真菌 没法获得这些养分。 这是基本的经济学, 随着资源获取的难度上升, 其价值上升。 植物被迫为同样数量的资源 支付更多。

But it's not all in favor of the fungus.Plants can be extremely cunning as well. There are some orchids -- and I alwaysthink orchids somehow seem like the most devious of the plant species in theworld -- and there are some orchids that just tap directly into the network andsteal all their carbon. So these orchids, they don't even make green leaves tophotosynthesize. They're just white. So rather than photosynthesizing, tap intothe network, steal the carbon and give nothing in return.

但这并非全有益于真菌。植物也可以非常狡猾。有一些兰花—— 我总觉得兰花像是地球上 最阴险狡猾的物种 —— 有一些兰花 它们直接进入真菌网络, 并偷走所有的碳。 这些兰花,它们甚至 不生长绿叶来进行光合作用。 它们就是纯白的。 所以它不是通过光合作用, 而是进入网络, 偷走碳 并从不回报。

Now I think it's fair to say that thesetypes of parasites also flourish in our human markets. So as we began to decodethese strategies, we learned some lessons. And the first one was that there'sno altruism in this system. There's no trade favors. We don't see strongevidence of the fungus helping dying or struggling plants unless it directlybenefits the fungus itself.

现在我觉得以公平来讲,这样的寄生生物 在人类市场中也不少。 随着我们对这些策略的解码, 我们也学到了一些东西。 第一点是这个系统 没有利他主义, 没有贸易优惠。 我们没有看到显著的的证据表明 真菌会帮助将死 或处于困境的植物, 除非这跟真菌的直接利益相关。

Now I'm not saying if this is good or bad.Unlike humans, a fungus, of course, cannot judge its own morality. And as abiologist, I'm not advocating for these types of ruthless neoliberal marketdynamics enacted by the fungi. But the trade system, it provides us with abenchmark to study what an economy looks like when it's been shaped by naturalselection for hundreds of millions of years in the absence of morality, whenstrategies are just based on the gathering and processing of information,uncontaminated by cognition: no jealousy, no spite, but no hope, no joy.

我不评论这个好还是坏。与人类不同, 真菌自然无法评判自己的道德。 而且作为一个生物学家, 我也不倡议真菌所执行的这种无情的 新自由主义市场动态。 但交易系统, 它为我们提供了一个 研究市场经济模样的基准, 当它在道德缺失的环境下 被几亿年的自然选择 所塑造时, 当策略仅仅基于 收集和处理信息, 不受认知影响: 没有妒忌,没有怨恨, 但没有希望,也没有快乐。

So we've made progress in decoding the mostbasic trade principles at this point, but as scientists we always want to takeit one step further, and we're interested in more complex economic dilemmas.And specifically we're interested in the effects of inequality.

所以我们此刻已经解码了最基本的交易原则,但作为科学家, 我们总是想要再进一步, 我们感兴趣的是更复杂的 经济两难的窘境。 我们尤其感兴趣不平等的影响。

So inequality has really become a definingfeature of today's economic landscape. But the challenges of inequality are notunique to the human world. I think as humans we tend to think that everything'sunique to us, but organisms in nature must face relentless variation in theiraccess to resources.

不平等真的成为了今天经济图景中 一个决定性特征。 但不平等的挑战 不是人类社会所特有的。 作为人类,我们倾向于 认为我们一切都是独一无二的, 但是自然界的生物 必须要面对不断变化以获取资源。

How does a fungus that can again be meterslong change its trade strategy when it's exposed simultaneously to a rich patchand a poor patch? And, more generally, how do organisms in nature use trade totheir advantage when they're faced with uncertainty in terms of their access toresources?

当一种真菌同时暴露在一块肥沃的和一块贫瘠的土地上时,它是如何改变自己的交易策略的呢?并且,更普遍的,自然界中的有机体在面对获取资源的不确定性时,是如何利用交易来为自己牟取资源?

Here's where I have to let you in on asecret: studying trade underground is incredibly difficult. You can't see whereor when important trade deals take place. So our group helped pioneer a method,a technology, whereby we could tag nutrients with nanoparticles, fluorescingnanoparticles called quantum dots. What the quantum dots allow us to do isactually light up the nutrients so we can visually track their movements acrossthe fungal network and into the host root. So this allows us finally to see theunseen, so we can study how fungi bargain at a small scale with their planthosts. So to study inequality, we exposed a fungal network to these varyingconcentrations of fluorescing phosphorus, mimicking patches of abundance andscarcity across this artificial landscape. We then carefully quantified fungaltrade. And we found two things.

这里我要告诉你们一个秘密:研究地下交换网络非常困难。你不知道在何处与何时重要的交易会发生。于是我们团队帮助开拓了一种方法,一种技术,用纳米颗粒标记营养物质,荧光纳米颗粒叫做量子点。这些量子点可以让我们点亮营养物质, 这样我们就能视觉监测 它们在真菌网络 到宿主根茎的运动。 这让我们终于能够看到 原本看不到的东西, 于是我们能够研究真菌 在微观上是如何跟它们的植物宿主议价的。 所以为了研究不平等, 我们将一个真菌网络 暴露在这些不同浓度的荧光磷中, 在这片人工景观中模拟 肥沃与贫瘠的小块土地。 然后我们仔细地量化真菌的交易。 我们发现了两件事情。

The first thing we found was thatinequality encouraged the fungus to trade more. So I can use the word"encouraged" or "stimulated" or "forced," but thebottom line is that compared to control conditions, inequality was associatedwith higher levels of trade. This is important, because it suggests thatevolving a trade partnership in nature can help organisms cope with theuncertainty of accessing resources.

我们发现的第一件事是不平等会鼓励真菌交易更多。所以我可以使用 “鼓励”、“刺激”或“迫使”这样的词。 但基本结论是 与控制条件相比, 不平等与更高水平的交换有关。 这很重要, 因为这说明 在自然中积极发展交易伙伴 可以帮助生物体 应对资源获取的不确定性。

Second, we found that, exposed toinequality, the fungus would move resources from the rich patch of the network,actively transport them to the poor side of the network. Now, of course, wecould see this because the patches were fluorescing in different colors. So atfirst, this result was incredibly puzzling. Was it to help the poor side of thenetwork? No. We found that the fungus gained more by first moving the resourcesto where demand was higher. Simply by changing where across the network thefungus was trading, it could manipulate the value of those resources.

第二,我们发现,在不平等条件下,真菌会将资源从网络的肥沃部分积极地传输到网络的贫瘠部分。当然,我们能够看到这个是因为这两块土地呈现不同颜色。 所以起初, 这个结果真的非常令人费解。 真菌是在帮助网络中的贫瘠部分吗? 不是,我们发现 真菌通过将资源转送到需求更高的地方 可以赚取更多。 只需要改变 真菌进行交易资源的位置, 它就可以操纵这些资源的价值。

Now this stimulated us to really dig deeperinto how information is shared. It suggests a high level of sophistication, orat least a medium level of sophistication in an organism with no cognition. Howis it that a fungus can sense market conditions across its network and thenmake calculations of where and when to trade? So we wanted to look aboutinformation and how it's shared across this network, how the fungus integratescues.

这激发我们去更深层次地挖掘信息是如何共享的。这现象暗示了 在一个不具备认知能力的生物体中 具有的高度的复杂性, 或者至少中等程度的复杂性。 这个真菌是如何能够感知到 自己网络中的市场状况 并且计算得出何时何地交易的? 我们想要研究信息、 信息是如何在这整个网络中共享的, 以及真菌是如何整合这些线索的。

So to do that, what you need to do is divedeep in and get a higher resolution into the network itself. We began to studycomplex flows inside the hyphal network. feet right now.

为找寻这些问题的答案,你需要做的是钻的更深并拿到该网络更高清晰度的成像。我们开始研究菌丝网络内部的复杂流动。

So we're working now with biophysicists totry to dissect this complexity. How is the fungus using these complex flowpatterns to share and process information and make these trade decisions? Arefungi better at making trade calculations than us?

我们现在和生物物理学家一起在尝试剖析这种复杂性。真菌是如何利用这种复杂的流动模式 来分享和处理信息 从而去做这些交易决定的? 真菌的交易计算的能力 比我们的强吗?

Now here's where we can potentially borrowmodels from nature. We're increasingly reliant on computer algorithms to makeus profitable trades in split-second time scales. But computer algorithms andfungi, they both operate in similar, uncognitive ways. The fungi just happensto be a living machine.

这是我们可能可以从自然中借用的模型。我们日益依赖于 能让我们在即刻盈利的 电脑算法。 但电脑算法和真菌, 它们同样都以, 无认知的方式运行着。 真菌只是碰巧是个活体。

What would happen if we compare and competethe trading strategies of these two? Who would win? The tiny capitalist that'sbeen around since before and the fall of the dinosaurs?

如果我们让这两种交易策略进行对比和竞争 会怎样? 谁会获胜? 这个在恐龙时代之前 就存在的小资本家?

My money is on the fungus.

我会给真菌下赌注。

Thank you.

谢谢。

(Applause)

(掌声)

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