Chapter 6 - Disability after Darwin

Summary

This chapter builds upon feminist reinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory to reconsider how the processes of variation, heritability, and natural selection do not preclude the possibility of thriving disabled life. Despite the cooptation of Darwinian thinking by later social Darwinists and eugenicists that led to the mass institutionalization and genocide of disabled people, I argue that Darwin’s scientific writings provide the unexpected foundations for a counter-eugenic reading of evolution in their conception of life as perpetually changing and thus open-ended. From the perspective of disability, the value of an organism’s adaptation and form cannot be predetermined by any static notion of fitness that presumes ablebodiedness as a prerequisite for viable life. By reading evolutionary temporality and Darwin’s own disabled lived experience through disability theory’s conception of crip time, I ultimately suggest that Darwinian evolution imagines disability not reductively as an evolutionary dead end but instead as the variable adaptation of human survival.