E is for ELEPHANT (#5 of 312)

I love the story of the blind men who describe an elephant. They each describe a specific part by feeling it. One guy grabs a leg and is convinced it’s a tree, another grabs the tail, and so on with ear and tusk and nose and skin. Someone points out that they are all correct, in their own way, but their vision is so incomplete. I love this as an example of seeing only part of the picture.

I was reading this summer Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon which is an amazing book on taxonomy. On page 296 she compares the science of taxonomy to this story of the blind men describing an elephant, but… she adds… someone who has tasted, dissected, reconstructed the skeleton of, hunted, lived among, studied DNA of… an elephant.

There are many ways to know things.