How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

Product Information

Often, scientists leverage similarity in affordances to group together similar creatures. Originating with Gibson ( 2015/1986), affordances are what the environment “ offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 2015/1986, 119). Affordances involve a relation between an organism and specific features of its environments: the media in which it survives, the surfaces with which it interacts and the active behaviour of other goal-directed critters ( ibid. 122–127). Building on the work of contemporary ecological psychologists, we understand affordances broadly as ‘opportunities for behaviour’: suites of relationships constituted by repertoires of possible organismic behaviours and features of the world exploited by the organism in pursuit of goals. (Chemero 2009, 151; Walsh 2015). Affordances, then, are relationships between an organismic relatum (a behavioural and phenotypic repertoire) and an environmental relatum (the set of features exploitable by such behaviours). Footnote 9 On our view, there are often constructive relationships between these relata: just as organisms are shaped by their environment, so too are environments actively shaped by organisms. 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!’

Not shared by any other event, apart from spatiotemporal location and self identity (or it is unknowable whether they are shared by other events). Or Hoppitt WJE, Brown GR, Kendal R, Kendal L, Thornton A, Webster MM, Laland KN (2008) Lessons from animal teaching. Trends Ecol Evol 23(9):486–493 The crocodile winked one eye as the elephant’s child came closer. He put his head down close to the crocodile’s musky, tusky mouth and the crocodile caught him by his little nose and said between his teeth “I think today I will begin with an elephant’s child”. Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Then that bad Elephant’s Child spanked all his dear families for a long time, till they were very warm and greatly astonished. He pulled out his tall Ostrich aunt’s tail-feathers; and he caught his tall uncle, the Giraffe, by the hind-leg, and dragged him through a thorn-bush; and he shouted at his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and blew bubbles into her ear when she was sleeping in the water after meals; but he never let any one touch Kolokolo Bird.

Start planning your tailor-made holiday today...

Powell R (2020) Contingency and convergence: Toward a cosmic biology of body and mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA On this account, there is no easy route from a tapir-like trunk to an elephant’s trunk: the evolutionary path leading to elephant trunks was shaped by a distinct set of selective pressures that required not only specific starting conditions to get off the ground, but also further events downstream. By this hypothesis, both specific proto-elephant traits and a semi- or fully-aquatic environment, along with the later co-option of these traits in a terrestrial niche, were required to evolve the highly plastic, multi-purpose organ. If this latter account is right, then although one might class both elephants and other mammals together, one nonetheless cannot use tapirs (or other large ungulates) as models for the elephant’s evolution, nor can one take the elephant as the extreme end of an evolutionary trajectory that tapirs are potentially traversing. This is because, on this account, trunks are the outcome of a path-dependent cascade. Trunk evolution was dependent on multiple events: elephants having particular morphology, being located in (semi-) aquatic environments and so on.

This puts us in a position to draw on the case studies and argue against pessimism more forcefully. This we undertake the next section. In the one following, we consider cases of ‘apparent uniqueness’ before concluding. Radical pessimism 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): Lewontin RC (1998) The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer. In: Scarborough D, Sternberg S (eds) An invitation to cognitive science, Vol 4: Methods, models and conceptual issues. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 106–132 These epistemic limitations are most evident in those areas of the life sciences that deploy historical explanation. While inheriting well-known problems with historical explanation more generally, Footnote 1 explanations of uniqueness—the emergence of a new species, trait, or kind of evolutionary individual—face additional sources of pessimism. After all, if a trait is non-recurrent, then it seems incomparable: other lineages won’t possess it. And if this is so, one should be gloomy about the explanatory prospects of comparative approaches. Then the Elephant’s Child felt his legs slipping, and he said through his nose, which was now nearly five feet long, ‘This is too butch for be!’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). Shchekalin, V. (director) (1936). "A Little Elephant (How the Elephant Got His Trunk))". Animator.ru. We develop and clarify much of this machinery in our discussion of the elephant’s trunk. As we conclude, whether the trunk is best understood as unique in the sense of being a statistical outlier or a path-dependent cascade is still very much up for grabs in the empirical literature. We then turn to human teaching. Here we suggest that accounts attempting to characterize human beings as mere statistical outliers is on shaky ground; there seems to be increasing evidence that human teaching—as well as several other capacities—is most fruitfully understood as the outcome of a path-dependent cascade. The elephant’s trunk There are no acceptable scientific theories that can explain unique events because unique events: Occur once and only once. Their significant properties or parameters, specified in the topic description of the why-question, are either:

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. As we’ve argued, uniqueness attributions are description-dependent and interest-relative. As such, there is latitude to treat any trait as unique and investigate them as such. Yet when the dramatic set of traits described above occurs, we think it will often be more illuminating to situate such traits in the well-understood event-type comparison class of polyploidy. For despite being the outcome of multiple, low-probability events, polyploidy is a widespread and common event in plant evolution, being particularly common among angiosperms and even more common amongst crop plants. Polyploidy can even be induced in many plants through chemical applications, such as colchicine (Curry 2016). So although polyploidy’s effects are dramatic—and do not result in the same effects among all species (Soltis et al. 2015)—we think such traits are better situated in well understood event-type generalizations of hybridization, unreduced gamete formation and developmental plasticity. Or to put it another way, the recurrent syndrome of traits associated with polyploidy is not well explored by treating any particular instance as a statistical outlier or a path-dependent cascade. The Butterfly that Stamped – how Solomon saved the pride of a butterfly, and the Queen of Sheba used this to prevent his wives scolding him.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. Kitcher P (1989) Explanatory unification and the causal structure of the world. In: Explanation S (ed) Philip Kitcher and Wesley C Salmon. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 410–505 Wagner GP (2014) Homology, genes, and evolutionary innovation. Princeton University Press, Princeton

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 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. The stories, first published in 1902, are origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various features of animals came to be. [4] A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's "How Fear Came", in The Second Jungle Book (1895). In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes. Two points are worth making regarding this strategy. First, although these moves generate explanations by unifying different species into a shared (if abstract) evolutionary trajectory or set of affordances, the unity at work is not a broad ‘super-empirical’ virtue that one might use to decide between competing explanations (Churchland 1985; Kitcher 1981, 1989). Instead, the strategy attempts to highlight deep causal regularities between evolving systems and environments, with abstraction facilitating the identification and evidencing of such regularities (Strevens 2008). Second, the two evolutionary similarity criteria identify different kinds of regularities and thus establish different kinds of uniqueness attributions. They do so in part because the contrast classes are established using different kinds of similarity. Smith RJ, Wood B (2017) The principles and practice of human evolution research: Are we asking questions that can be answered? CR Palevol 16(5–6):670–679Next he asked the hippopotamus why her eyes were red. And so the elephant’s child continued to worry all the animals with countless questions. Brigandt I, Love AC (2010) Evolutionary novelty and the evo-devo synthesis: field notes. Evol Biol 37(2–3):93–99 He asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched. The most frustrating unknown for this elephant child was the mysterious question: what does the crocodile have for dinner? Scuse me,’ said the Elephant’s Child, ‘but my nose is badly out of shape, and I am waiting for it to shrink. That is odd,’ said the Elephant’s Child, ‘because my father and my mother, and my uncle and my aunt, not to mention my other aunt, the Hippopotamus, and my other uncle, the Baboon, have all spanked me for my ‘satiable curtiosity—and I suppose this is the same thing.