The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works.
A little more than a hundred years later, a very different kind of artist got somewhat more specific. Although Walt Disney is best remembered today for his Magic Kingdom, his chief contribution to the art of animation was not his extraordinary imagination but his extraordinary realism.
The obvious candidate, at first glance, is the animal kingdom. Supernatural creatures are, after all, creatures, and we infer from them, or impose upon them, all kinds of biological characteristics. Like their natural counterparts, they can be organized by taxon , or by habitat . Given this tendency to situate unnatural beings in the natural world, it seems conceivable that our judgments about their plausibility might reflect how well they conform to the constraints of modern biology.
Indeed, some fantastical creatures seem positively ordinary compared with the more byzantine products of four billion years of evolution. Consider the giant oarfish, a thirty-six-foot-long behemoth with a silver body, a bright-red mane, and a tendency to hang out in the ocean vertically, like a shiny piscine telephone pole.
So much for biology as the basis of our unified theory. But we can resolve at least some of these problems by modifying our hypothesis slightly. Perhaps we don’t care how much supernatural creatures resemble the animal kingdom in general; perhaps we only care how much they resemble. This mirror theory of plausibility would still account for the high ranking of yetis, which, aside from not existing, are not so different from.
Others, however, can do flatly impossible things. Fairies, by most accounts, can turn invisible, tell the future, and shape-shift. Ghosts can shrink, expand, time-travel, and walk through walls. Vampires can command the dead, summon storms, control lesser animals like bats and wolves, and—barring certain interventions with stakes or sunlight—live forever.
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