chapter 19The Illusion of Biological Variation: A Minimalist Approach to the Mind

Abstract

AbstractThe topic that I want to talk about today falls under the title “The illusion of biological variation.” Let’s consider a canonical perceptual illusion, one in which the image is completely static, with nothing moving at all, except that your visual system thinks it is. Now, no matter how many times you tell the subject that the image is static, his or her visual system won’t believe it; it can’t. Illusions are interesting because, no matter how aware we are of them, they simply won’t go away. Similarly, and by way of analogy, I will suggest today that much of the variation that we see in the natural world is in some sense an illusion because at a different level of granularity, there are some core invariant mechanisms driving the variation.