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. The founders weren't representative—they were survivors of a massacre. When Darwin observed finches on a single Galápagos island, he risked hasty generalization; only by sampling across the archipelago did he discover adaptive radiation. Small samples lie by omission, preserving accidents as if they were laws.