How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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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 Then Kolokolo Bird 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.’

Ereshefsky M, Turner D (2019) Historicity and explanation. Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2019.02.002 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 trunkOn 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). 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.

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

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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

Rasmussen LEL, Munger BL (1996) The sensorineural specializations of the trunk tip (finger) of the asian elephant, elephas maximus. Anat Rec 246:127–134 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.I think, said the Crocodile—and he said it between his teeth, like this—’I think to-day I will begin with Elephant’s Child!’

McConwell AK (2019) Contingency’s causality and structural diversity. Biol Philos 34:26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9679-x Then the Elephant’s Child put his head down close to the Crocodile’s musky, tusky mouth, and the Crocodile caught him by his little nose, which up to that very week, day, hour, and minute, had been no bigger than a boot, though much more useful. researchers are tempted] to pose and try to answer, tempting but unrealistic research questions. There is much we would like to know about human evolutionary history, but wanting to know something does not make it knowable ( ibid, 677).Shoshani J (1998) Understanding proboscidean evolution: a formidable task. Trends Ecol Evol 13(12):480–487 Shchekalin, V. (director) (1936). "A Little Elephant (How the Elephant Got His Trunk))". Animator.ru. Powell R (2020) Contingency and convergence: Toward a cosmic biology of body and mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA