How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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Brigandt I, Love AC (2010) Evolutionary novelty and the evo-devo synthesis: field notes. Evol Biol 37(2–3):93–99

Powell R (2020) Contingency and convergence: Toward a cosmic biology of body and mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 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. One might object that our account is limited: that it misses attributing uniqueness to cases where it should and attributes uniqueness to cases where it shouldn’t.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 Scuse me,’ said the Elephant’s Child most politely, ‘but have you seen such a thing as a Crocodile in these promiscuous parts?’ Walsh, Sue (September 2007). "Kipling's Children and the Category of 'Children's Literature' ". The Kipling Society . Retrieved 27 October 2016. Boynton, H. W. (May 1903). "Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. A review by H. W. Boynton". The Atlantic . Retrieved 27 October 2016. Unlike other apes, in humans, teaching could have been favoured by the requirement to transmit complicated skills and technology that are not easily acquired through inadvertent social learning. (Hoppitt et al., 491)

Smith and Wood infer from our lineage’s uniqueness to pursuit being unjustified. However, as we’ve seen, establishing the uniqueness or otherwise of elephant’s trunks requires a complex array of investigative approaches. Scientists consider several coarse-grained definitions of the trait—is it a proboscis like a tapir, a soft mouth-part like a giraffe’s tongue, or a snorkel?—and these definitions are tested in various ways. The process of identifying uniqueness involves stages of empirical investigation. In human teaching, we see both the development of coarse-grained functional definitions of teaching which ground comparative work across taxa, happening in parallel with more human-focused approaches which knit together various strands of causal-pathway evidence.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-07 06:00:36 Associated-names Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936; Gorbaty, Norman, ill Boxid IA40169616 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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: How might this strategy apply to the trunk? Consider Milewski and Dierenfeld, ( 2013), who group the elephant trunk into a broad trait category they call proboscises: “flexible, tubular extension of the joint narial and upper labial musculature that is, at least in part, used to grasp food” (85). This identifies similarities as a specific kind of affordance (grasping) associated with a specific morphological structure (roughly, snouts). So understood, elephants are not alone in having a proboscis. Tapirs have them too. Like elephants, tapir proboscises are flexible, tubular narial projections used to grasp food. Nonetheless, there are significant differences in the extent to which their proboscises facilitate grasping. Desjardins E (2011a) Reflections on path dependence and irreversibility: lessons from evolutionary biology. Philos Sci 78(5):724–738 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).

Hannon E, Lewens T (eds) (2018) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford I anticipate human teaching is at the extreme end of the distribution of teaching and that, like other apparent exceptions that in fact prove the rule, explaining teaching in humans will inform our understanding of teaching across species. (Kline 2015, 56) 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. 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. 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.’Or perhaps it arose alongside the development of tusks, which prevent elephants getting close to their food with their mouth alone. 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). Uniqueness has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. This is surprising given its important role in the life sciences. There it is often claimed that events, traits, or lineages are unique; for example, that evolutionary events are contingent (McConwell 2019, Currie 2018), irreversible (Maynard-Smith & Szathmary, 1995) or idiosyncratic (Wong 2019); that human beings evolve under unique cultural circumstances (Henrich 2015); and that lineages bear unique, novel traits (Wagner 2014). The metaphysics of evolutionary kinds further suggests an important role for uniqueness. The dominant view understands such kinds as individuals: particular trajectories deserving of narrative explanation (Hull 1976).

Brown P, Sutikna T, Morwood MJ, Soejono RP, Saptomo EW, Due RA (2004) A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores. Indonesia Nature 431(7012):1055At the end of the third day a fly came and stung him on the shoulder, and before he knew what he was doing he lifted up his trunk and hit that fly dead with the end of it. Elephant ran off, with his now very long nose hanging down in front of his feet. He was distraught, and hid in the bush as he was too embarrassed to face the other animals.