Clustering illusion

Biological Parallel

Animal foragers evolved to detect resource clusters—berries clump on fertile soil, termite mounds cluster near water, fish school in thermal layers. Albatrosses use Lévy flight patterns (long straight paths punctuated by intensive local search) because oceanic prey genuinely clusters non-randomly. Human pattern detectors inherit this clustering assumption: we see cancer clusters in random distributions, interpret random stock movements as trends, identify 'hot zones' in crime data that are pure noise. The illusion is adaptive—missing a real cluster (false negative) costs calories, imagining a false cluster (false positive) just triggers brief investigation.