How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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At 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. 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):670–679 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: Pretorius Y, de Boer WF, Kortekaas K, van Wijngaarden M, Grant RC, Kohi EM, Mwakiwa E, Slotow R, Prins HH (2016) Why elephant have trunks and giraffe long tongues: how plants shape large herbivore mouth morphology. Acta Zoologica 97(2):246–254 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

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.Finally he made it to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about the fever trees, precisely as Kolokolo bird had said. Photo credit: Derek Keats Hannon E, Lewens T (eds) (2018) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford

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.’ 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.Churchland PM (1985) The ontological status of observables: In praise of the superempirical virtues. Images sci. 35–47. By and by, when that was finished, he came upon Kolokolo Bird sitting in the middle of a wait-a-bit thorn-bush, and he said, ‘My father has spanked me, and my mother has spanked me; all my aunts and uncles have spanked me for my ‘satiable curtiosity; and still I want to know what the Crocodile has for dinner!’ 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

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. Some initial caveats. First, while we offer some examples (in ‘ The uniqueness of what?’) demonstrating the widespread interest in uniqueness, we do not aim to provide an exhaustive survey of all the areas or topics in the life sciences where uniqueness attributions might be made. Second, and as noted above, ‘uniqueness’ is only infrequently an explicit target in life sciences research. This is in part because the term isn’t a common one in biological nomenclature. It may also reflect the fact that researchers have developed various strategies for situating putatively unique traits in comparison classes, as we demonstrate below. Our analysis, then, is not focused on explicating the term, but instead focuses on how scientists grapple with non-recurrent events, employ strategies and tools to make sense of them, and justify the explanations they give. Let’s turn to an alternate account. On this second evolutionary narrative, elephants evolved in a strikingly divergent way from other ungulates. This narrative begins by situating proto-elephants in aquatic or semi-aquatic environments. This isn’t so outlandish as it may seem, as some of the elephant’s closest living relatives are the sea-cows (manatees and dugongs). On this ‘aquatic elephant’ hypothesis, what drove trunk evolution was not grasping food but snorkelling: in the aquatic environments in which they found themselves, it was adaptive to move submerged through water. It was only later that the trunk was co-opted for increased grasping functionality. Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

The real reason behind such a long nose

The Beginning of the Armadillos – how a hedgehog and tortoise transformed into the first armadillos. Brigandt I, Love AC (2010) Evolutionary novelty and the evo-devo synthesis: field notes. Evol Biol 37(2–3):93–99

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. 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.Krause J, Fu Q, Good JM, Viola B, Shunkov MV, Derevianko AP, Pääbo S (2010) The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature 464(7290):894 The 2 battled for hours, and with every pull and tug, Elephant's nose stretched a little more.Eventually, Crocodile became too tired to pull any more, and let go of Elephant. 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