This chapter is about processes of display. Examining the history of ‘freakshows’ I argue that those labelled ‘freaks’ not only constituted part of the population of disabled people, but helped to contribute to the conceptualisation of that category in the public sphere.I argue that the popularity of the freakshow and the prevalence of impairment as a key part of it, attests to the significance of disability as a contemporary social concern. Relatedly, I argue that freakshows contributed to how disability came to be objectified as something ‘other’ and something beyond, if not antithetical to, the self. The chapter is structured around the lives of key performers on the nineteenth-century freakshow circuit: Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’); Eng and Chung Bunker (the ‘original Siamese Twins’); Tom Wiggins (‘Blind Tom’); Krao (the ‘Missing Link’); and Maximo and Bartola (‘The Aztec Lilliputians’). It will be noted that all of these performers, except for my first example, Joseph Merrick, were not only disabled or disfigured but were also people of colour and often from colonial sites. This fact, which arises from the sources, tells us something important about the relationship between disability and race in the construction of bodily anomaly.

In this chapter I address flaws in lineage thinking that are common in the professional, popular, and eductional literature, and which result from confusing the branching relationships between collateral relatives in the realm of systematics with the linear relationships between ancestors and descendants in the realm of evolutionary descent. The influential voices of the late Stephen Jay Gould and Robert O’Hara, who dubbed the now ubiquitous phrase ‘tree thinking’, have warned readers for decades against the sins of linear evolutionary storytelling and the use of linear evolutionary imagery. However, I argue that their impact has been deeply pernicious. The writings of Gould and O’Hara fundamentally misconstrue the relationship between the branching realm of systematics and the linear realm of evolving lineages. I close with a discussion of the problem that, in the absence of a vocabulary designed to talk about lineages, we are forced to discuss them in the taxic language of systematics. This inevitably causes problems.