How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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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.

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 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. The Tabu Tale – how Taffy learnt all the taboos. Missing from most British editions; first appeared in the Scribner edition in the U.S. in 1903. Boynton, H. W. (May 1903). "Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. A review by H. W. Boynton". The Atlantic . Retrieved 27 October 2016. 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”.But let us turn now to consider how our account fares when dealing with a putatively unique trait in a paradigmatically unique lineage: teaching in human beings. Human teaching The elephant’s child waited three days for his trunk to shrink, but it never grew any shorter, and, besides, it made him squint. The name Effie does not appear in the text of the stories, where the narrator now and again says O my Best Beloved to his listening child instead. Henrich J (2015) The Secret of our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton

Pearce T (2012) Convergence and parallelism in evolution: A Neo-Gouldian account. Br J Philos Sci 63:429–448We 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 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). 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!’ Come hither, Little One,’ said the Crocodile, ‘for I am the Crocodile,’ and he wept crocodile-tears to show it was quite true.

Wong TW (2020) Evolutionary contingency as non-trivial objective probability: Biological evitability and evolutionary trajectories. Stud Hist Philos Sci Part c: Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 81:101246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2019.101246 The Cat that Walked by Himself – explains how man domesticated all the wild animals, even the cat, which insisted on greater independence. He finally stumbled across a Kolokolo bird who said with a mournful cry, “Go to the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees, and find out.” Photo credit: Magnus Manske

One day, Elephant was at the river, and was kneeling down drinking from the fresh water. Crocodile swam past, and saw Elephant at the water's edge. Crocodile was feeling particularly hungry, and saw an opportunity for a good meal. Crocodile swam stealthily up to where Elephant was, and suddenly lunged out of the water and grabbed Elephant by the nose. 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

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. The Elephant used to only have a small snout in The Beginning. This didn't bother him unduly, in fact he was rather proud of his small nose because it never got in the way of feeding and drinking. At the end of the third day a fly stung him on his shoulder, and before he knew it he lifted up his trunk and hit that fly dead. Vantage one.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. Ereshefsky M, Turner D (2019) Historicity and explanation. Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2019.02.002