ABSTRACT
Occam’s Razor, the principle of parsimony, should perhaps be taken to apply only to the ultimate rules that may be found to govern biological systems. Two thousand years of progress and increasingly accelerating rates of empirical findings have uncovered ever more complex factors and interrelations between contributing factors rather than ever simpler accounts of human spatial behaviour. It seems nicely paradoxical that the aim of current cognitive neuroscience – to take account of findings from molecular biology (Zhou & Black, 2000), neurology, psychology and philosophical analyses – is only made possible by progressively more detailed studies of multiple small areas within the disciplines. But it does suggest the direction that is likely to take us forward.
