Why Fish Don't Exist

David Starr Jordan spent his life attempting to pin order onto the natural world. As a prominent nineteenth-century ichthyologist, he believed that studying the hidden and insignificant details of nature would reveal a divine hierarchy. He discovered and named thousands of aquatic species, building a massive collection that represented his desperate need to categorize existence. This obsessive taxonomy served as a psychological shield against the unpredictable forces of the universe, providing a false sense of control over a fundamentally chaotic reality.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 shattered Jordan's life work, sending thousands of preserved specimens crashing to the floor. Instead of surrendering to the devastation, Jordan immediately began sewing nameplates directly into the flesh of the salvaged specimens. This extreme display of perseverance demonstrated a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. His grit initially appeared heroic, suggesting that sheer human will could conquer entropy and restore meaning to a fractured world.

Grit eventually mutated into a dangerous form of self-delusion. Jordan cultivated what psychologists call positive illusions, allowing him to maintain extreme self-confidence and optimism in the face of contradictory evidence. This psychological armor made him ruthless. When Jane Stanford died of apparent strychnine poisoning, Jordan used his authority to suppress the evidence and declare her death the result of natural causes. His need to protect his position and his meticulously ordered universe overrode any commitment to objective truth or justice.

The belief in a rigid natural ladder directly fueled the American eugenics movement. Jordan concluded that if nature was hierarchically ordered, human society must also be pruned of its perceived imperfections. He became a leading advocate for forced sterilization, promoting policies that targeted vulnerable populations deemed unfit. His taxonomy of aquatic life translated seamlessly into a taxonomy of human worth, weaponizing scientific authority to justify the systemic abuse and erasure of marginalized people.

The very foundation of Jordan's life work collapsed under the scrutiny of modern science. The field of cladistics groups organisms based strictly on evolutionary ancestry rather than superficial similarities. This method revealed that the creatures commonly grouped together as fish actually belong to entirely different evolutionary lineages. A lungfish shares a closer evolutionary ancestor with a cow than it does with a salmon. Consequently, the biological category of fish is a scientifically meaningless human invention used to impose arbitrary boundaries on nature.

The erasure of rigid biological categories opens the door to a more compassionate understanding of worth. The Dandelion Principle illustrates that value is highly contextual. While a dandelion is universally categorized as a weed by some, it is simultaneously a crucial medicine and habitat in other contexts. This principle directly counters the eugenicist obsession with objective perfection. It proves that a life deemed unfit by a rigid societal hierarchy still holds immense value through the tangible care and connection shared between individuals.

Abandoning the desperate need for order fundamentally transforms human perspective. The realization that fish do not exist forces a surrender of deeply held certainties and exposes the limits of human intuition. Clinging to arbitrary categories acts as a mental constraint, while accepting doubt invites a more expansive engagement with the world. Tearing down the illusion of order allows people to stop running from chaos and instead embrace the complex, unpredictable reality that exists beyond human-made grids.