Yeah, I get that.

I’m just saying that the environmental relativity of functional fit qua Dalek doesn’t provide any evidence for that model. Although I suppose you can then tack on some stuff about the human environment being largely a social construction … etc etc

Matt – I think dsquared is referencing (consciously or not) the social model of disability, a sociological model created by disability activists.

“in fact, thinking about it, there’s another paper to be written about the ambiguity of the word “Dalek”. ”

Dalek as dualist creature, or unified embodied cognition. Discuss. I really should go and work…

I haven’t heard this before. But people called Thatcher lots of things… She Who Must Be Obeyed. The Great She-Elephant. The Iron Lady. Daggers. “The eyes of Caligula, the lips of Marilyn Monroe” said François Mitterrand, to which someone on the Guardian Diary ungallantly added “the gait of an anglepoise lamp”.

The recent dalek episodes demonstrated that they have no problem communicating with South Wales.

Otherwise, Matt is of course right. There’s a site which purports to explain 2001: http://www.kubrick2001.com/ which comes to similar ideas about humans being unfitted for space. In a vacuum, a Kaled-Dalek is a lot less disabled than a human or non-mutated Kaled would be.

Online registration for the conference seems to be discriminatory toward Daleks: I don’t see how they can type with a ray gun and a sink plunger.

Chris is right about what constitutes a ‘Dalek’ or a ‘Tardis’ one can buy. Borders here in Cardiff (possibly like Borders elsewhere, but I can’t be certain about that) sells a lot of Dr Who related tat, and it’s all only the outside stuff. So, the Trades Descriptions Act seems to with Chris and against D2.

Interestingly, modern humans can’t survive in most of the environments in which we humans now live without clothing. So, in some respects, the actual situation humans shares some similarities with the Kedal. Straw-dawkins might say that the Dalek is part of the extended phenotype of the Kaled.

Depending on which objectivist/naturalist line you take Dalek/Kedal could be disabled or not disabled.

If you take the statistical line, individual Kedal are not disabled [assuming they are statistically typical of the Kedal type]. However, if one Kaled was statistically atypical in ways that meant he couldn’t drive his Dalek then he’d be a disabled Kaled.

If you take the evolutionary history line, there are several options:

i) you could say that the question about whether a Dalek (Kedal) is disabled or not is a non-question. Kedal don’t have the sort of aetiology that lets you make attributions of biological functional norms in the usual way.

or

ii) Kaled are disabled. Kaled don’t function in the ways that their evolutionary history selected for.

or

iii) Kaled aren’t disabled. They function in the ways their evolutionary history selected for [and that evolutionary history included interventions by Davros].

Depends on how you view artificial selection. I’m not sure if artificial selection is discussed much in the literature on biological functions/malfunctions. It might be and I’m just ignorant of it.

There’s is a whole literature on the relationship between theories of artefactual functioning and theories of biological functioning. Some people arguing that the two can be subsumed under the same analysis and some arguing they cannot.

The Dalek/Kaled case is difficult because they look like a hybrid biological/artefactual case.

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None of this is my view, btw. I take a (sort of) welfarist approach to disease and disability. I'm not 100% sure how I'd handle the Kaled case on my model. I'm pretty sure I'd say they weren't disabled but there are bits of the case that trouble me.

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