Concept · Cognitive Bias: Causal and statistical fallacies
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence)
Origin: Traditional; 20th century formalization
Biological Parallel
Textbooks celebrate antibiotic resistance as natural selection in action—bacteria evolve, humans lose. True, but incomplete. Suppressed: most resistant strains pay severe fitness costs and vanish when antibiotics are removed. The full picture reveals trade-offs, not just triumph. Cherry-picking adaptive success while ignoring failure modes creates misleading models of how selection actually operates in constrained environments.