本文通过一种甲虫的多代跟踪研究证明，溺爱孩子的父母会让没有优秀基因的子女存活下来，这种基因代代相传将降低后代的生存能力。

Helicopter beetles

Parenting can be bad for the kids

At least, from a genetic point of view

注：fret担忧、烦恼、焦虑。例句：She started to fret when she realized she had left her phone at home.（当意识到把手机忘在家里时，她开始焦虑不安。）

hands-off不干涉的、放手不管的。例句：The manager took a hands-off approach and let the team make their own decisions.（那位经理放任团队自己做决定。）

feral通常指野生、未被驯化的动物。feral跟fierce（凶猛的）同源，野生动物往往是凶猛的。

Smother使窒息、压制、覆盖。smother本义是suffocate with smoke，在物理上表示覆盖物体，使其不能透气或不能移动。在情感上，smother指过度关心或照顾某人，使其感到束缚窒息。

Evolution, it seems, faces similar trade-offs. In a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on May 24th, Rahia Mashoodh and Rebecca Kilner, a pair of biologists at the University of Cambridge, offer an explanation for a curious fact: once a species has evolved to care for its young, the trait is almost never lost again. They argue that parental pampering comes with a genetic price that makes returning to the status quo ante difficult.

注：Pampering纵容、溺爱、娇惯，通常指过度地照顾或保护，使其变得软弱无力，不能自立。除了Pampering，本文还使用doting表示溺爱。Doting溺爱、宠爱、过分喜爱，通常指过度地喜爱和关注，甚至超出了正常的程度。

Status quo ante 是拉丁语，意思是“原来的状态”，Status quo表示现状。例如战争结束后，双方会协商恢复战前的边界和政治局面，这种状态就称为status quo ante。

The price in question is mutations—random changes in an organism’s genome. Some are seriously harmful, and quickly weeded out by natural selection. But many are only mildly deleterious, and do not much hamper an individual’s chances of reproducing as long as conditions are good. With that in mind, researchers have long speculated that doting parents provide exactly the sorts of pleasant environment that allow offspring with mildly damaging mutations to survive when they otherwise would not.

注：Weed out 意为“淘汰”、“清除”，通常用于形容去除不需要、不合格的部分，以便提高效率和质量。例如，一家公司可能会淘汰部分员工以减少成本，提高绩效。

Deleterious有害的、有毒的，通常用于描述对人体、环境的负面影响。例如，吸烟被认为是对健康有害的行为。

Testing the theory requires tracking species over many generations. That is tricky, for many species that provide parental care are irritatingly long-lived. Dr Mashoodh and Dr Kilner turned to the burying beetle, which combines parental care with a relatively short lifespan. The beetles breed in the corpses of small mammals and birds, turning them into carefully tended nests and regularly spraying them with disinfectant chemicals to keep them clear of bothersome pathogens. When their young hatch, the parents protect them from predators and feed them bits of the carcass.

注：Burying beetle兽葬甲，它们会在死亡的小动物身上产卵，并将它们埋在土里。这种甲虫被认为是益虫，可以解决腐肉，促进土壤肥沃。

Carcass通常指已经死亡并且腐烂的动物尸体。也可以指建筑、交通工具或其他大型物体的残骸。在食品加工业中，Carcass通常指去除了内脏、头部和四肢的动物肉体。

The researchers set up two populations. In one, beetles were raised by doting parents. In the other, beetles hatched out of eggs near a dead mouse but had no parents to make life easier. This split was maintained for 20 generations.

Drs Mashoodh and Kilner then inbred the resulting descendants. Inbreeding amplifies damaging mutations, and often results in extinction. But the rate at which inbreeding drives a species off the evolutionary cliff varies with how many damaging mutations are present in the first place.

注：Inbred是指家畜或植物品种内部交配，导致基因重复和固定化的情况。由于基因多为同源，因此后代容易出现缺陷和疾病。inbred 被认为是不利于种群健康和繁殖的。

The population of beetles whose ancestors had been pampered by their parents died out in just two generations of inbreeding. By contrast, beetles that had a history of surviving alone endured for four. That strongly suggests that the hatchlings denied parental care over the course of many generations ended up with considerably healthier genomes than those that had been looked after by mum and dad.

注：Hatchlings指鸟类、爬行动物等新孵化的幼小动物。-ling表示幼小的，例如duckling（小鸭子）、gosling（小鹅）等。

Parental care, in other words, is a one-way evolutionary street because it generates a problem that only it can solve. That makes going backwards hard. But it is not all bad news. Although most mutations are harmful, the researchers point out that a few are helpful. They speculate that a species full of helicopter parents might expose its young to more of the evolutionary bad—but also more of the good.

注：Helicopter parents 是指那些过度干涉和保护子女的父母。他们像直升机一样不断地盘旋在子女周围，时刻关注子女的一举一动，试图控制和影响子女的生活。这可能会对子女的成长和发展产生负面影响，使他们失去独立性、自我意识和自信心。

还有一种Lawnmower parents （收割机父母），指那些试图消除子女面临的所有困难和挑战的父母。割草机父母是直升机父母的升级版，他们不等着困难出现，而是一直走在孩子前面，随时替他们清除孩子可能会面临的所有障碍。有些孩子因此逐渐变得性格扭曲，极其懒惰，从而失去生存能力（摘自百度百科）。