Strevens M (2008) Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

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) Milam EL (2019) Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America. Princeton University Press, Princeton Often, scientists leverage similarity in affordances to group together similar creatures. Originating with Gibson ( 2015/1986), affordances are what the environment “ offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 2015/1986, 119). Affordances involve a relation between an organism and specific features of its environments: the media in which it survives, the surfaces with which it interacts and the active behaviour of other goal-directed critters ( ibid. 122–127). Building on the work of contemporary ecological psychologists, we understand affordances broadly as ‘opportunities for behaviour’: suites of relationships constituted by repertoires of possible organismic behaviours and features of the world exploited by the organism in pursuit of goals. (Chemero 2009, 151; Walsh 2015). Affordances, then, are relationships between an organismic relatum (a behavioural and phenotypic repertoire) and an environmental relatum (the set of features exploitable by such behaviours). Footnote 9 On our view, there are often constructive relationships between these relata: just as organisms are shaped by their environment, so too are environments actively shaped by organisms. Then that bad Elephant’s Child spanked all his dear families for a long time, till they were very warm and greatly astonished. He pulled out his tall Ostrich aunt’s tail-feathers; and he caught his tall uncle, the Giraffe, by the hind-leg, and dragged him through a thorn-bush; and he shouted at his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and blew bubbles into her ear when she was sleeping in the water after meals; but he never let any one touch Kolokolo Bird. 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.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 This can be seen by comparing Pretorius et. al’s narrative to the ‘aquatic elephant’ hypothesis. This latter hypothesis groups together comparators on the basis of presumed similarity in evolvability—the complex dispositional properties of lineages to explore evolutionary space (Brown 2014)—with phylogenetic proximity often serving as a proxy measure. On this account, uniqueness attributions point to specific evolutionary events as explanations for why an evolutionary trajectory—diverging from those of its comparators—could result in the trait in question. Such divergences are by their nature highly path-dependent and can involve coordinated, multi-factorial cascades of changes.

Birch J (2021) Toolmaking and the Origin of Normative Cognition. Biol Philos. 36(4). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09777-9H. W. Boynton, writing in The Atlantic in 1903, commented that only a century earlier children had had to be content with the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, but in his day "a much pleasanter bill of fare is being provided for them". Boynton argued that with Just So Stories, Kipling did for "very little children" what The Jungle Book had done for older ones. He described the book as "artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor. It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy". [12] Modern [ edit ]