Discarding a Category That Does Not Serve

‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’ is a book that intrigues me

Swimming through Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller.

The Biographical Subject of ‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) collected fish specimens. Initially he caught them himself, but on an 1880 trip he used “intimidation tactics to force Chinese and Chinese-American fishermen to fork over their best catches,” Miller writes. Collecting fish gave him “that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order.” He suffered the loss of a young wife and two children. Collecting, as a compulsive behavior, can give someone the illusion of being more in control and can help them take their mind off their troubles.

Perhaps due to his penchant for trying to label living beings and thereby control the chaos of the world, Jordan became interested in eugenics. While some eugenicists imagined incentives like “paying elites to have more babies” or “legalizing polygamy for the upper class,” Jordan endorsed a more coercive approach of sterilizing “people he saw as ‘unfit’.” He was instrumental in advocating this in the United States. “In 1907,” Miller writes, “a few of his friends from Bloomington…