How the Elephant Got His Trunk (Picture Books)

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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. Importantly, we further break down evolutionary similarity into two distinct criteria, each of which furnishes a characterization of uniqueness. The first, similarity in selection regimes highlights how shared selection pressures can generate similar traits. On this criterion, uniqueness is equated with being a statistical outlier: traits at an extreme end of a statistical distribution that result from severe and/or persistent selection regimes. The second, evolvability similarity, groups together traits on the basis of dispositional tendencies of lineages to evolve in similar ways. Here, unique traits are the result of path-dependent cascades. Briefly, one can understand a ‘path-dependent cascade’ using machinery developed in the contingency literature. Desjardins ( 2011a, b) defines path dependence as holding when an outcome is probabilistically dependent on the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of specific events along a causal pathway, which he distinguishes from dependence on initial conditions. For the latter, where one begins matters, for the former, what happens along the way matters. A trait is the result of a path-dependent cascade when an evolutionary trajectory diverges from relevant contrasts in exploring a different region of evolutionary space as a result of specific events along its evolutionary pathway. 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. 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. 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

He went from Graham’s Town to Kimberley, and from Kimberley to Khama’s Country, and from Khama’s Country he went east by north, eating melons all the time, till at last he came to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, precisely as Kolokolo Bird had said.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 Best elephant gifts: 7 elephant-themed present ideas you can’t resist So how did the elephant get its trunk?

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. Hoppitt WJE, Brown GR, Kendal R, Kendal L, Thornton A, Webster MM, Laland KN (2008) Lessons from animal teaching. Trends Ecol Evol 23(9):486–493Not shared by any other event, apart from spatiotemporal location and self identity (or it is unknowable whether they are shared by other events). Or Kipling illustrated the original editions of the Just So Stories. [5] Later illustrators of the book include Joseph M. Gleeson. [6] Editions [ edit ] The elephant's trunk might even have started out as a snorkel in a semi-aquatic ancestor. This seems more plausible when you consider that elephants’ closest living relatives are the fully-aquatic manatees and dugongs. 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 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.