In 1866 Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley teamed up to urge Darwin to replace ‘natural selection’ with ‘survival of the fittest’ in future editions of the Origin. They felt that the purely ex post facto process suggested by this phrase would undercut the creationist objection that natural selection is haunted by intentional design. However, this is inaccurate. Thinking of natural selection as survival of the fittest leads to confusions between Darwin’s theory and the closely related but different accounts of Wallace, Spencer, and Huxley. Darwin’s own conceptual framework relied on comparing natural selection to the artificial selection of plant and animal breeders to argue for a trans-generational process in which natural selection gradually shape chance variant traits of individuals into adaptations. The notion of survival of the fittest changed that to perceiving natural selection primarily as the executioner of unfit organisms, in the process allowing it to serve as backing for unrestricted capitalism (‘social Darwinism’), racist imperialism, and eugenics.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

Since the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the High Jump has never been the same. That’s when Dick Fosbury accomplished the fabulous feat of sailing over the crossbar headfirst and backward to earn his coveted Gold Medal! Today, we take it for granted that Fosbury’s Flop has always been the “gold standard” style in the sport. But, it wasn’t. The “scissors” and the “straddle” jumps had been the two dominant styles. How did Fosbury develop this ungainly technique? Was it a stroke of genius? Did he experience a flash of insight – a so-called eureka moment? Was this revolutionary style his and his alone? How did Fosbury’s technique acquire its catchy alliterative moniker? The answers to these questions are quite surprising and force us to consider behavioral innovations such as Fosbury’s from an altogether different perspective – one that applies a natural science approach to both innovative and everyday behavior.