How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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Desjardins E (2011a) Reflections on path dependence and irreversibility: lessons from evolutionary biology. Philos Sci 78(5):724–738 Walsh, Sue (September 2007). "Kipling's Children and the Category of 'Children's Literature' ". The Kipling Society . Retrieved 27 October 2016. a b Held, Lewis I. (2014). How the Snake Lost its Legs. Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo. Cambridge University Press. pp.ix–xi. ISBN 978-1-107-62139-8.

Interestingly, we think understanding uniqueness attributions as being about traits allows one to understand similar claims made in terms of lineages, events, or processes; a lineage is unique just in case it possesses a unique trait ( mutatis mutandis for events and processes). Next he asked the hippopotamus why her eyes were red. And so the elephant’s child continued to worry all the animals with countless questions. At this, O Best Beloved, the Elephant’s Child was much annoyed, and he said, speaking through his nose, like this, ‘Led go! You are hurtig be!’ All that can really be said for certain is that it’s not the result of a tug of war with a duplicitous crocodile on “the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo.”Pessimists make a claim about epistemic power and a claim about pursuit: if one targets unique traits, one won’t make much epistemic progress and therefore investigations of unique traits will be fruitless. Both claims are mistaken. Soon, however, Elephant realised that his new stretched nose was more useful than his previously small snout. He was able to reach food and drink without kneeling any more, and could even reach high branches and pull them down to eat the fruit and leaves.

a b Mabee, Paula M. (2005). "The New "Just So" Stories". BioScience. 55 (10): 898–899. doi: 10.1641/0006-3568(2005)055[0898:tnjss]2.0.co;2.In this paper, we provide an analysis of uniqueness; one that sheds light on the nature and role of uniqueness attributions in the life sciences. Though there are metaphysical issues in the neighborhood, we focus on the epistemological implications of uniqueness attributions. More specifically, our attention focuses on unique trait attributions. Unique traits are non-recurrent and as such, limit researcher abilities to acquire evidence, test hypotheses and provide explanations concerning them. In the words of the man who wrote the Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling, this is his story of how the elephant got his trunk (with slight modifications for an easier read): Shoshani J (1998) Understanding proboscidean evolution: a formidable task. Trends Ecol Evol 13(12):480–487

This can be seen by comparing Pretorius et. al’s narrative to the ‘aquatic elephant’ hypothesis. This latter hypothesis groups together comparators on the basis of presumed similarity in evolvability—the complex dispositional properties of lineages to explore evolutionary space (Brown 2014)—with phylogenetic proximity often serving as a proxy measure. On this account, uniqueness attributions point to specific evolutionary events as explanations for why an evolutionary trajectory—diverging from those of its comparators—could result in the trait in question. Such divergences are by their nature highly path-dependent and can involve coordinated, multi-factorial cascades of changes. Eventually the crocodile let go of the elephant’s nose with a plop that you could hear all up and down the Limpopo River. Photo credit: Danny Goirdano On this functional notion, meerkat teaching shows up as being surprisingly similar to human teaching; scorpion hunting being the prime example. Meerkat ‘helpers’ provision their young with scorpions in distinct stages—dead, stingless and fully functional—in a way that is indexed to the learner’s age (Thornton and McAuliffe, 2006; 2008). This allows the inexperienced to learn the subtle art of scorpion-dispatching in stages. Such teaching fits the functional schematic: if one wants to eat a scorpion, biting off its stinger and passing it to a young meerkat is not beneficial to the helper (the first requirement) and a slow, staged introduction to the dangerous business certainly increases the chances of the novice to learn how to perform it (the second requirement). The Crab that Played with the Sea – explains the ebb and flow of the tides, as well as how the crab changed from a huge animal into a small one.

Thank you,’ said the Elephant’s Child, ‘I’ll remember that; and now I think I’ll go home to all my dear families and try.’ The Elephant’s Child sat there for three days waiting for his nose to shrink. But it never grew any shorter, and, besides, it made him squint. For, O Best Beloved, you will see and understand that the Crocodile had pulled it out into a really truly trunk same as all Elephants have to-day. But one day, there was a new elephant. An elephant’s child was born. He was different in the way that he was full of insatiable curiosity. Photo credit: Hailey Bowden Kline MA (2015) How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals. Behav Brain Sci. e31. Strevens M (2008) Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

urn:lcp:howelephantgotit0000rich:epub:8ea4189d-6f90-49cf-98c5-37d2b0b3a880 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier howelephantgotit0000rich Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5s877b1k Invoice 1652 Isbn 0805066993 Lccn 2002007216 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9014 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-0000798 Openlibrary_edition Powell R (2020) Contingency and convergence: Toward a cosmic biology of body and mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA These accounts adopt a coarse-grained functional schematic: if one animal (the tutor) modifies its behaviour when in the presence of another (the pupil) in such a way that (i) no benefit is gained by the tutor; (ii) the likelihood of the pupil adopting the behaviour increases, then the tutor is teaching. With this in hand, researchers are able to deduce the kinds of selection pressures that might produce teaching and as a consequence, to apply similar kinds of models and reasoning across the contrast class.In the face of such pessimism, we point to heterogeneous means and methods for gathering evidence and providing explanations in the life sciences. These provide the foundation for a more optimistic take on the role of uniqueness attributions. We build our account by examining when evolutionary researchers make uniqueness claims and how they then investigate them. Employing two case studies—elephant trunks and human teaching—we show how scientists group together traits into contrast classes using criteria of similarity. Affordance similarity groups together traits that display qualitative similarities in the affordances they exploit, while evolutionary similarity groups together traits on the basis of similar evolutionary circumstance. As we argue, there are reasons to be optimistic whichever criterion a researcher adopts: non-recurrence does not preclude sophisticated and powerful means of evolutionary investigation and explanation. Shettleworth SJ (2012) Modularity, comparative cognition and human uniqueness. Philos Trans Royal Soc b: Biol Sci 367:2794–2802