MAN, as time counts in geology and in the history of evolution, is a very recent arrival in his planet. For countless millions of years only very simple animals existed. During other countless millions, new types gradually evolved -- fishes, reptiles, birds and, at last, mammals. Man, the species to which we happen to belong, has existed for, at most, a million years, and has possessed his present brain capacity for only about half that time. But recent as is the emergence of man in the history of the universe, and even in the history of life, the emergence of his titanic powers, at once terrifying and splendid, is very much more recent. It is only about six thousand years since man discovered his capacity for distinctively human activities. These began, we may say, with the invention of writing and the organization of government.
Source： Bertrand Russell: Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954, part II: The Conflict of Passions, chapter 10: Prologue or Epilogue? n1
More info.：https://russell-j.com/cool/47T-2_1001.htm
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Today's quote from Russell is merely a summary of human history, but don't you think it still allows us to appreciate his concise and lucid writing style? Both ChatGPT and Google Translate render "countless millions" as "（数えきれないほどの何百万年もの間）countless millions of years,” but wouldn't it be more appropriate to translate it as "（何億年もの間）hundreds of millions of years”? Incidentally, it is said that the horseshoe crab descended from trilobites that lived around 570 million years ago (in the Cambrian period), and evolved into its current form by around 200 million years ago (in the Jurassic period). And so, we ended up with someone like President Trump, could this be considered a result of evolution?
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