Concept · Cognitive Bias: Modern cognitive/philosophical fallacies
Homunculus fallacy
Origin: Modern philosophy of mind
Biological Parallel
Early embryologists imagined a tiny, fully-formed human inside the sperm—a homunculus requiring its own homunculus ad infinitum. Modern developmental biology reveals the actual mechanism: Hox gene gradients specify body axes without any preformed blueprint. The "master controller" fallacy recurs in neuroscience: there's no single brain region that "watches" all the others. Distributed processes, not miniature overseers, generate complex organization.