How homo academicus got his name and other just-so stories

Abstract

There are many things in life, including the nature of human origins and behaviors, that modern science cannot explain. To understand these phenomena, we posit theories and try to test them, but often, in the end, we are left only with faith and speculation to assuage our anxiety about the human condition. Origin myths are speculative claims about our past that help us make sense of our present and future. In storytelling, they make light of human vulnerability relative to the forces of nature, in language, they set a cognitive framework through which to construct shared meanings about the world, and in science, they provide the "givens" that we must assume in order to work out our theories and proofs about the things we observe around us. At the turn of the century, Rudyard Kipling concocted a number of origin myths, called "Just-so Stories" (1902) to explain observable variations in animal life to young children. One such story, "The Elephant's Child" (1902), speculates about the origins of the elephant's trunk. "In the high and far-off times," writes Kipling, "the elephant had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it" (Kipling 1902). Until one day, a young elephant who was full of"satiable" curiosity ventured off to the banks of the great Limpopo River, where he encountered a crocodile who bit him on the nose and pulled and pulled until the elephant's nose had stretched to nearly five feet long. Having narrowly escaped with his life and a seriously misshappen nose, the elephant's child returned to his elephant family, who quickly realized the practical utility of having a trunk and ventured off, one by one, to the river to "borrow new noses from the crocidile" (Kipling 1902). Ever since that day, Kipling muses to his young audience, "all the elephants you will ever see, besides all those that you won't , have trunks precisely like the trunk of the 'satiable Elephant's Child" (1902).