Christopher: Most of us are taught that persistence is a virtue. That grit is the key to success. But what if the same drive that makes someone a hero is also what turns them into a monster? What if one of history's greatest scientists was also one of its most dangerous? Lucas: Whoa. That’s a heavy opener. You’re saying the line between hero and villain is that thin? I’m hooked. What are we talking about today? Christopher: We are diving into the deep, and very strange, waters of Lulu Miller's incredible book, Why Fish Don't Exist. Lucas: Lulu Miller, she's the co-founder of that fantastic NPR show, Invisibilia, right? I love her work. She has such a unique way of looking at the world. Christopher: Exactly. And she brings that same talent for weaving science and storytelling to this book. It starts with her own personal crisis—a period of heartbreak and nihilism where she feels like her life is a complete wreck. And in her search for a way to cope, she stumbles upon this almost mythical figure from history, a scientist named David Starr Jordan. Lucas: Okay, so she’s looking for a role model. A guide for how to deal with chaos. Christopher: Precisely. And on the surface, David Starr Jordan seems like the perfect person. He’s a man who stared into the abyss of chaos and didn’t just survive—he fought back.

Lucas: So who was this David Starr Jordan? What made him seem so heroic to her? Christopher: Well, he was one of the most prominent scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A taxonomist, specifically an ichthyologist, which means he studied and classified fish. He was obsessed with creating order. He discovered and named nearly a fifth of all fish species known to science at the time. Lucas: A fifth? That’s an insane amount of work. He must have had a massive collection. Christopher: He did. His life’s work was housed at Stanford University, where he was the founding president. Thousands of glass jars, each holding a unique specimen, each with a carefully written tin tag bearing its name. It was his cathedral of order. And then, on a spring morning in 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake hit. Lucas: Oh no. I can see where this is going. Christopher: It was total devastation. The university was rubble. Jordan rushed to his lab, and the sight was apocalyptic. The book describes it so vividly. Jars shattered everywhere. Flounders crushed by fallen stone, eels severed by shelves. But the worst part wasn't the physical damage. It was what the book calls the "existential" damage. Lucas: What does that mean? Christopher: The tin name tags. They had all been shaken loose. Hundreds, nearly a thousand of them, were scattered randomly across the floor. His meticulously named species were now just… anonymous corpses in a pile of glass and ethanol. The book puts it perfectly: "In those forty-seven seconds, Genesis had been reversed." Lucas: Wow. That gives me chills. His entire life's work, un-named, un-done in less than a minute. I would have just sat down and cried. What did he do? Christopher: This is the moment that makes him a legend. He didn't despair. He didn't give up. The book says he rolled up his sleeves, scrambled around the wreckage, and found, of all the weapons in the world, a sewing needle. Lucas: A sewing needle? What for? Christopher: He realized the tin tags in jars were too fragile. So, he decided to make his order indestructible. He picked up each fish, one by one, and with that needle and thread, he sewed the name tag directly onto its body. A name stitched to its throat. To its tail. Even, in some cases, to its eyeball. Lucas: You’re kidding. He sewed names onto their eyeballs? That’s… metal. It’s an act of pure defiance. Christopher: It’s unbelievable, right? It's this story of radical persistence that made the author, Lulu Miller, see him as a beacon of hope. A man who could teach her how to rebuild her own life. He saved his collection, and his method became a new standard. He seemed like the ultimate victor against chaos. Lucas: Absolutely. I’m sold. He’s my new hero. A scientist with the grit of a warrior. What an amazing story.

Christopher: It is an incredible story of resilience. And it's what drew the author to him. But as she dug deeper, she found that this same obsession with order, this unwavering belief in a 'correct' way for things to be, had a horrifyingly dark side. Lucas: Uh oh. Your tone just changed. What did she find? Christopher: Well, first she found smaller cracks in the heroic facade. Evidence suggesting Jordan may have covered up the murder of his boss, Jane Stanford, to protect the university's reputation. He publicly claimed she died from overeating, when evidence strongly suggested she was poisoned with strychnine. Lucas: Okay, that’s already pretty bad. Covering up a murder is not exactly heroic behavior. Christopher: It's not. But it was just the tip of the iceberg. The real darkness, the thing that shatters his entire legacy, was his other great passion besides fish. David Starr Jordan was one of America's most influential and ardent champions of eugenics. Lucas: Wait, hold on. This is the same guy? The hero with the needle? He was a eugenicist? That's... monstrous. Christopher: Not just a eugenicist. A leader of the movement. He believed that society's problems—poverty, crime, what he called 'feeblemindedness'—were genetic. He saw humanity as a collection to be curated, just like his fish. The 'unfit' needed to be weeded out. Lucas: How does someone go from lovingly classifying nature to wanting to 'cleanse' humanity? That leap feels enormous. Christopher: The book traces it back to his mentor, Louis Agassiz, who taught him about the Scala Naturae—the 'ladder of nature.' This is the idea that there's a divine hierarchy in the world, from lowly bacteria at the bottom all the way up to the pinnacle: man. Jordan internalized this idea of a ladder. He saw it everywhere. Some species were 'better' than others. And he applied that same logic to people. Lucas: So he believed some people were just inherently 'lower' on the ladder? Christopher: Exactly. He wrote books and gave speeches arguing that the 'human harvest' needed to be improved. He chaired the committee that helped legalize forced sterilization in America. He wrote, and this is a direct quote, "each individual cretin should be the last of his generation." His work gave scientific legitimacy to policies that led to the forced sterilization of over 60,000 Americans, disproportionately affecting poor women and people of color. Lucas: That is absolutely sickening. The same man who so carefully preserved the identity of every single fish, worked to erase the future of thousands of human beings. The contradiction is staggering. Christopher: It's the core paradox of his life. His drive for order, which seemed so noble when applied to fish, became a tool for unimaginable cruelty when applied to people. He was so certain his 'order' was the right one, he was willing to destroy lives to achieve it.

Lucas: So is the lesson just that our heroes are all flawed? That even the best intentions can lead to monstrous outcomes? That's kind of depressing. Christopher: It would be, if that's where the story ended. But here's the most amazing part. The universe, in a way, got the last laugh on David Starr Jordan. Lucas: What do you mean? Christopher: Decades after his death, a new field of science called cladistics emerged. It uses genetics to map the true evolutionary tree of life. And cladists, armed with DNA, discovered something incredible. The category 'fish'—the thing Jordan dedicated his entire life to, the thing he built his cathedral of order around—doesn't actually exist. Lucas: Hold on, what? Fish don't exist? I’m pretty sure I saw some at the aquarium last week. Christopher: Biologically speaking, as a single, coherent category, they don't. It's a human invention, a label of convenience. For example, a lungfish, which we call a fish, is more closely related to a cow than it is to a salmon, which we also call a fish. The 'fish' category is a jumble of different evolutionary branches that we've artificially grouped together because they happen to live in water and have fins. Lucas: Whoa. My mind is a little blown right now. So his life's work was… based on a fiction? Christopher: A beautiful, useful, but ultimately human-made fiction. And this is the profound lesson Lulu Miller lands on. Jordan's fatal flaw wasn't his love of order. It was his belief that his categories were real, that they were divine truth. He believed in a rigid ladder. Lucas: And that's the whole point, isn't it? The category 'fish' is a fiction we impose on nature. And the eugenicist's category of 'unfit' people is an even more dangerous fiction we impose on humanity. They're both just lines we draw on the world. Christopher: Precisely. They are shackles we create. The 'death of the fish' becomes this beautiful metaphor. When we let go of these rigid, artificial categories, we don't get chaos. We get something far more beautiful and true: an interconnected web. Lucas: That’s a much more hopeful ending than I was expecting. It’s not about tearing down heroes, it’s about tearing down the false ladders they were climbing.

Christopher: Exactly. Jordan's story isn't just about a flawed hero. It's a powerful warning. His mistake wasn't believing in order; it was believing his version of order was the only one. He was so obsessed with his ladder that he couldn't see the truth that was right in front of him, the truth that Darwin himself understood. Lucas: Which was what? Christopher: That nature isn't a ladder. There is no single line from 'lowly' to 'divine.' As the book says, nature is a "gridless place" of endless, sprawling, interconnected variation. Homogeneity is a death sentence for a species; diversity is its greatest strength. Lucas: It makes you question all the categories we take for granted. In our own lives, in society... what ladders are we still climbing that don't even exist? Christopher: It's a powerful thought, and it's at the heart of this book. It challenges you to look at the world and see the web, not just the rungs. We'd love to hear what categories you're questioning after hearing this. Find us on our socials and share your thoughts. Lucas: This is Aibrary, signing off.