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. a b Held, Lewis I. (2014). How the Snake Lost its Legs. Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo. Cambridge University Press. pp.ix–xi. ISBN 978-1-107-62139-8. These accounts adopt a coarse-grained functional schematic: if one animal (the tutor) modifies its behaviour when in the presence of another (the pupil) in such a way that (i) no benefit is gained by the tutor; (ii) the likelihood of the pupil adopting the behaviour increases, then the tutor is teaching. With this in hand, researchers are able to deduce the kinds of selection pressures that might produce teaching and as a consequence, to apply similar kinds of models and reasoning across the contrast class. Then the Elephant’s Child felt his legs slipping, and he said through his nose, which was now nearly five feet long, ‘This is too butch for be!’

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.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.

Thornton A (2008) Variation in contributions to teaching by meerkats. Proceedings Royal Soc b: Biol Sci 275(1644):1745–1751 Or perhaps it arose alongside the development of tusks, which prevent elephants getting close to their food with their mouth alone.Brigandt I, Love AC (2010) Evolutionary novelty and the evo-devo synthesis: field notes. Evol Biol 37(2–3):93–99 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 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. 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 Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press, Chicago