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The fallacy consists of creating a narrative that fits the phenomena one is trying to explain. The narrative does not have any scientific validation, but because it fits the facts so well it is accepted as truth.

Example: Why women like pink? Well, in our primitive past as hunters and gatherers women took the role of gathering edible fruits. Because many of the berries they were interested in collecting had shades of pink they evolved to be more sensitive to this specific color through natural selection.

We know that our perception of pink as a women's color is based entirely on culture and the narrative above is not based on any known scientific fact. Nevertheless I can see people falling for that. I've seen this fallacy used mostly on "evolutionary psychology" arguments. Is there a particular name for this fallacy?

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    Creating a narrative that fits the facts is the method of science, and so not a fallacy. In your example "they evolved to be more sensitive to this specific color" is an idle speculation unless and until corroborated to "fit the facts". Perhaps what you are looking for is called false narrative, a pattern misidentified due to insufficient or inaccurate information or to insufficient or inaccurate assessment (perhaps in order to mislead).
    – Conifold
    Nov 16, 2016 at 1:24
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    No clear fallacy there. Assuming what you say in 3, then 2 is merely a bad hypothesis from incomplete data -- not a fallacy (A major reason has to do with the distinction between "informal fallacies" which are judgment calls and formal fallacies which are errors of argumentation). There's a large set of similar things we call "genetic explanation" (where genetics does not mean the genome but rather that we explain something with reference to a series of past events). A second and related idea is the naturalistic fallacy which confuses what we see in nature for an ought.
    – virmaior
    Nov 16, 2016 at 7:06
  • regarding evolutionary psych, the term is "just-so stories", after Kipling's Jungle Book, I believe.
    – user20153
    Nov 20, 2016 at 22:14

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it's called Crabtree's Bludgeon, by way of contrast to Occam's Razor: "No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated"

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Also, Parsimony, which in the scientific method is an epistemological, metaphysical, or heuristic preference, not an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.

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