Lulu Miller
What happens when the scientific categories we use to organize our world turn out to be unstable? The realization that fish do not exist opens into a larger lesson about uncertainty, hierarchy, and the limits of human order.
David Starr Jordan dedicated his life to organizing nature through taxonomy, but his rigid beliefs later helped justify forced sterilization.
Modern cladistics reveals that the category of fish is not a stable scientific grouping but a human way of sorting very different creatures.
The human impulse to create order out of chaos can turn admirable perseverance into destructive arrogance when it loses humility.