Toward the Bio-Uncanny: Evolution, Perception, and the Pseudoscientific Rhetoric of the Liminal Face and Body

Abstract

This article reconsiders the concept of uncanny by shifting focus from artificial human-like simulations to the perception of biological bodies and faces. It begins with a theoretical overview – from Jentsch’s epistemic ambiguity, through Freud’s notion of the return of the repressed, to Mori’s “uncanny valley” hypothesis – showing how the uncanny involves both failures of classification and disruptions of perceptual or behavioral expectations. Building on this, the article explores the uncanny’s possible evolutionary function as a high-sensitivity alert system, triggered when a stimulus resists categorization and violates predictive coherence. These two dimensions – categorical uncertainty (CU) and violation of expectation (VE) – provide a structural template for uncanny experiences. Two case studies illustrate how CU and VE can interact. In mirror self-face perception in schizophrenia, disrupted predictive mechanisms fracture the sense of bodily continuity, producing perceptual dissonance that later gives rise to CU. In simianization – the racist portrayal of Black individuals as resembling or blending with nonhuman primates – ontological ambiguity is imposed in advance, shaping expectations about how the racialized body is to be perceived or will behave. In both cases, the uncanny emerges from a dynamic interplay between anticipation and categorization, where disturbance in one destabilizes the other. The article concludes by adding a third dimension: latency. The uncanny unsettles not only by confusing categories or defying expectations, but by revealing something long repressed or disavowed. Integrating this latent dimension with CU and VE provides a fuller account of the uncanny, grounded in the perceptual, evolutionary, and cultural conditions of human embodiment.