Concept · Cognitive Bias: Informal fallacies of presumption
Hasty generalization
Origin: Aristotle's tradition
Biological Parallel
Founder effects demonstrate what happens when small samples shape entire populations. Twenty-nine northern elephant seals survived 19th-century hunting; today's 200,000 descend from that bottleneck, carrying just a fraction of ancestral genetic diversity. Cheetahs show similar genetic uniformity from an ancient bottleneck—skin grafts between unrelated cheetahs don't reject because they're effectively clones. All Africanized 'killer' bees in the Americas descend from 26 queens that escaped a Brazilian lab in 1957. The founders weren't representative—they were accident survivors. Small samples lie by omission, preserving random events as if they were fundamental patterns.