When less is more in living systems: subtractive cognitive biases and life science learning

This commentary introduces additive and subtractive transformations as foundational human cognitive biases and proposes possible links to biological reasoning challenges in both novices and experts. These cognitive biases deserve more attention in biology and biology education given possible links to previously documented misconceptions, expert expectations, and student learning challenges. More educational attention (e.g. curriculum cases, pedagogical approaches) directed at subtractive biological transformations could serve as a novel conceptual framework for (i) uniting a series of deeply rooted learning challenges (e.g. ‘great chain of being’, teleological reasoning) and (ii) inducing cognitive dissonance about hard-to-access reasoning processes about the living world.