Discussions of the not-so-fit: how ableism limits diverse thought and investigative potential in evolutionary biology

Evolutionary biology and many of its foundational concepts are grounded in
a history of ableism and eugenics. The field has not made a concerted
effort to divest our concepts and investigative tools from this fraught
history and as a result, an ableist investigative lens has persisted into
present-day evolutionary research, limiting the scope of research and
harming the ability to communicate and synthesize knowledge about
evolutionary processes. This failure to divest from our eugenicist and
ableist history has harmed progress in evolutionary biology and allowed
principles from evolutionary biology to continue to be weaponized against
marginalized communities in the modern-day. To rectify this problem,
scholars in evolutionary research must come to terms with how the history
of the field has influenced their investigations and work to establish a
new framework for defining and investigating concepts, such as selection
and fitness.