Nova: Picture the person you love the most. Chaos will get them. It will rot your plants, kill your dog, and rust your bike. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is always growing, and it can never be diminished. But in 1906, when a massive earthquake shattered a scientist's life's work—thousands of rare fish specimens scattered and unlabeled on a ruined floor—he did not despair. He grabbed a sewing needle and began stitching their names directly into their flesh. Today, we are tackling this extraordinary story from three different angles. First, we will explore how a little self-delusion can build unstoppable grit. Then, we will look at the dark side of order, where a passion for naming turned into a crusade for genetic cleansing. And finally, we will reveal a mind-bending scientific discovery that proves the very category of fish is a complete illusion. I am Nova, and joining me today is Everjoy, an incredibly curious and analytical thinker who loves connecting the dots across science, history, and philosophy. Welcome, Everjoy!

Everjoy: Thanks, Nova! I am so excited to be here. You know, that opening hook about chaos really hits home. As humans, we are almost hardwired to build walls, write lists, and categorize everything just to keep the existential dread at bay. But this story of David Starr Jordan—using a sewing needle to fight back against a literal earthquake—it is such a wild, visceral metaphor for that struggle. I can't wait to unpack how his quest for order ultimately spun out of control.

Nova: It really did. And it is a journey that takes us from the beautiful to the bizarre, and eventually to the downright terrifying. Let's start with that moment of impact.

Nova: It is April 18, 1906, at 5:12 in the morning. The San Francisco earthquake strikes. David Starr Jordan, who was the very first president of Stanford University and a world-renowned taxonomist, wakes up to his house shaking violently. He manages to get his family to safety, but when he walks onto the campus, it is a scene of absolute devastation. The library, the gymnasium, the gorgeous church tower—all collapsed. But for Jordan, the real heartbreak was in his laboratory. For thirty years, he had been collecting, identifying, and naming fish. He had discovered about a fifth of the fish known to science at the time. And there they were, scattered across the floor in a soup of shattered glass, ethanol, and decaying specimens.

Everjoy: Oh, can you even imagine the smell? The pungent mix of alcohol and rotting fish. But it wasn't just physical damage, right? It was existential.

Nova: Exactly! The physical specimens were ruined, but worse, the tin name tags that had been resting precariously in the jars were scattered everywhere. In forty-seven seconds, the earthquake had essentially un-named his collection. It reversed Genesis. The named species became an amorphous unknown again.

Everjoy: That is a fascinating way to put it—reversing Genesis. Because to a taxonomist, naming is the act of creation. It is bringing order out of chaos. And yet, instead of throwing up his hands and saying, "Well, entropy wins," Jordan does something incredibly stubborn. He gets his colleagues, Professors Snyder and Starks, to stand there with hoses, spraying the pile of fish day and night for over forty-eight hours just to keep them wet while they wait for more alcohol to arrive. And then, he starts stitching.

Nova: Yes! He takes a sewing needle and thread, and he literally sews the name tags directly into the flesh of the fish—through the throat, the tail, the eyeball. He wanted to make sure that the next time chaos struck, his order would stand tall.

Everjoy: It is a brilliant, desperate innovation. But as an analytical thinker, I have to look at the psychology behind that level of persistence. In psychology, there is this fascinating concept called "positive illusions," popularized by researchers like Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown in the late 1980s. For a long time, psychologists thought that having an accurate perception of reality was the hallmark of mental health. But Taylor and Brown reviewed over two hundred studies and found the exact opposite. Mentally healthy people actually possess moderate self-delusions. They think they are more attractive, more in control, and more successful than they actually are.

Nova: Wait, really? So, the people with a perfectly accurate view of reality were... what?

Everjoy: They were clinically depressed! It is called "depressive realism." If you see the world exactly as it is—unbiased, chaotic, indifferent—it can be paralyzing. But if you have this "shield of optimism," this belief that "it is the will of man that shapes the fates," which was Jordan's personal mantra, you can keep charging forward. It is what Angela Duckworth calls "grit"—the ability to maintain effort over years despite failure and adversity.

Nova: That makes so much sense. Jordan had this incredible ability to edit his own narrative. When he lost prizes as a young man, he would write in his journal that it was because his thinking was "too expansive" or he was "too ethical." He reframed every single defeat as a sign of his own superiority.

Everjoy: Right, but there is a catch. While moderate positive illusions can give you the grit to survive an earthquake, excessive self-delusion can be incredibly dangerous. Researchers like Roy Baumeister have shown that people with grandiose, easily threatened self-esteem are actually the most prone to violence and aggression. When reality finally contradicts their beautiful self-image, they don't adapt—they lash out. They try to bend reality to fit their delusion. And that is exactly where David Starr Jordan's story takes a very dark turn.

Nova: It really does. And the first major crack in his heroic facade involves a murder mystery. In 1905, just a year before the earthquake, Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died under incredibly suspicious circumstances in Hawaii. She was eighty years old, and she had been clashing with Jordan. In fact, she was planning to fire him. She had hired a spy who reported that Jordan was running the university like a "gang leader" and covering up sex scandals.

Everjoy: Wow, the plot thickens! So Jane Stanford goes to Hawaii to recover from a previous, unsuccessful poisoning attempt in San Francisco, where someone put strychnine in her Poland Spring water. And then, at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu, she drinks some baking soda before bed, goes into violent convulsions, and dies within fifteen minutes. Her last words were, "I think I have been poisoned again."

Nova: Yes, and the local doctors, the coroner, and a jury of six citizens all concluded, without a doubt, that she died of strychnine poisoning. They found strychnine in her stomach and in her baking soda bottle. But when David Starr Jordan hears about this, he immediately jumps on a boat to Hawaii. He doesn't go to mourn; he goes to control the narrative. He hires a young, inexperienced doctor named Ernest Waterhouse for three hundred and fifty dollars—which is about ten thousand dollars today—and has him write a bogus report claiming Jane died of "heart failure due to overeating and hysteria."

Everjoy: It is wild! He actually convinced Jane's secretary, Bertha, to change her testimony to make it sound like Jane had gorged herself on gingerbread and sandwiches at a picnic. Jordan then releases a public statement discrediting the Hawaiian doctors, calling Jane's belief that she was poisoned "hysteria," and claiming the strychnine found in her body was just "medicinal." He completely whitewashed a murder to protect the reputation of Stanford University and, of course, his own job.

Nova: And here is the kicker, Everjoy. Years later, when the author of this book, Lulu Miller, was reading through Jordan's technical manual,, she found a passage on page 430. Jordan is explaining how to catch the peskiest of fish that hide in the cracks of tide pools. His recommendation? Use poison. And the specific poison he recommends? Strychnine. He literally writes that it is "the bitterest thing in the world."

Everjoy: Oh, that gave me chills when I first read that. The very poison used to kill his boss was a tool he used professionally for decades. Now, we don't have definitive proof that Jordan was the killer, but he absolutely executed the cover-up. And that willingness to sacrifice truth, to sacrifice human lives, for the sake of his preferred "order" is the exact same mindset that led him to champion eugenics.

Nova: Yes, let's talk about that. Because Jordan's obsession with order wasn't just about fish. He believed in a concept called the, or the Ladder of Nature, which he learned from his mentor, Louis Agassiz. It is this ancient idea that all of nature is arranged in a divine hierarchy, from the lowliest bacteria to fish, to birds, and finally to humans at the very top.

Everjoy: And Agassiz taught him that every species is a "thought of God." But when Darwin's came out, it proved that there is no ladder. Evolution is a tree, a bush, a chaotic tangle. There is no "better" or "worse" in evolution, only different ways of surviving. Jordan reluctantly accepted evolution, but he couldn't let go of the ladder. He just replaced "God" with "Time." He believed that some species, and some humans, were "degenerating" or falling down the ladder.

Nova: And that belief in "degeneration" is what fueled his passion for eugenics. He visited a town in the Italian Alps called Aosta, which was a sanctuary for people with physical and cognitive disabilities. Instead of seeing a compassionate community, Jordan was horrified. He called it a "veritable chamber of horrors" and blamed it on "charity" allowing the "unfit" to survive and reproduce. He became a leading voice for eugenics in America, writing books, giving speeches, and lobbying for forced sterilization laws.

Everjoy: It is a terrifying legacy. Jordan helped pass the very first forced sterilization law in Indiana, and later in California. And it all culminated in the infamous 1927 Supreme Court case,. Carrie Buck, a young woman who had been raped and institutionalized, was ordered to be sterilized. The Supreme Court ruled eight to one to uphold the sterilization, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing those chilling words: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Nova: It is heartbreaking. Over sixty thousand Americans were forcibly sterilized because of this movement. And it was all based on a complete misunderstanding of Darwin! Darwin actually argued that is the key to survival. Homogeneity is a death sentence for a species. If you try to prune the tree of life to make it a neat, orderly ladder, you actually make it fragile.

Everjoy: Exactly! Darwin's creed was diversity. But Jordan was so blinded by his need for a neat, tidy hierarchy that he ignored the science. He wrote off any critics as "sentimental" or "unscientific." He had built this beautiful, rigid ladder in his mind, and he was willing to crush anyone—whether it was Jane Stanford, Carrie Buck, or the laws of genetics—to keep that ladder standing.

Nova: But the ultimate irony of David Starr Jordan's life didn't come from a court of law or a political movement. It came from the fish themselves. Decades after his death, a new generation of scientists using a method called cladistics made a discovery that completely shattered his life's work. Everjoy, tell us why "fish" don't exist.

Everjoy: This is my absolute favorite scientific plot twist! Okay, so cladistics is a method of classifying organisms based on their shared evolutionary history, their actual ancestry, rather than just what they look like on the outside. For centuries, we grouped "fish" together because they have scales, fins, and live underwater. But when you actually look at the evolutionary tree, you find something shocking. A lungfish, which is a type of "fish" that can breathe air, is actually more closely related to a cow, a human, or a bird than it is to a salmon!

Nova: Wait, let's pause on that. A lungfish is more closely related to a cow than to a salmon?

Everjoy: Yes! Because the lungfish and the cow share a much more recent common ancestor that developed early lungs and limbs. If you want to create a scientifically valid group that includes both the salmon and the lungfish, you have to include that descended from that common ancestor. Which means you have to include cows, humans, birds, and reptiles. If you don't include us, then "fish" is not a real evolutionary category. It is just a convenient word we made up for "vertebrates that live in water and aren't mammals." In the eyes of evolutionary biology, there is no such thing as a fish!

Nova: It is mind-blowing. David Starr Jordan spent his entire life discovering, naming, and cataloging thousands of fish to build a monument to order. And in the end, the very category he dedicated his life to was proven to be a fiction. The fish defeated his ladder.

Everjoy: It is the ultimate cosmic joke, but it is also incredibly beautiful. When you give up the category of "fish," you don't lose the animals. You actually see them clearly for the first time. You see their incredible diversity, their unique adaptations, and their deep connection to us. It breaks down the artificial walls we build.

Nova: And that brings us to what the author calls the "Dandelion Principle."

Everjoy: Yes! I love this metaphor. To a lawn-obsessed homeowner, a dandelion is a weed—something to be poisoned and destroyed. But to an herbalist, it is medicine. To a painter, it is a rich yellow pigment. To a child, it is a wish. To a bee, it is a vital source of early spring food. The dandelion itself doesn't change; its value is entirely dependent on the context, on the web of relationships around it.

Nova: That is so powerful. The eugenicists failed to see the web. They wanted to rank people on a single, rigid scale of "fitness." But humans, like dandelions, have different values in different contexts. A person who might be deemed "unfit" by a cold, bureaucratic measure might be the very person who holds a family together, who brings joy to a community, who reflects light back into the world.

Everjoy: Exactly. When we let go of the rigid hierarchies, when we "mistrust our measures," as Lulu Miller writes, the world cracks open in the best way possible. We move from a world of strict categories to a "gridless place" of boundless possibilities.

Nova: It is a shift from certainty to curiosity. David Starr Jordan's tragedy was his absolute certainty. He was so sure of his ladder that he became a monster to protect it. But true progress, both in science and in life, is paved with doubt and a willingness to be open to revision.

Everjoy: Beautifully said, Nova. If there is one actionable takeaway for our listeners today, it is to look at the "dandelions" in your own life. What are the categories or expectations you've built for yourself, or for others, that might actually be acting as a shackle? What happens if you break through those categories and embrace the messy, beautiful chaos of reality?

Nova: I love that. Let go of the ladder, embrace the dandelion, and remember that sometimes, the most liberating thing you can discover is that the categories we take for granted don't actually exist. Thank you so much for sharing your incredible insights today, Everjoy!

Everjoy: Thank you, Nova! This was an absolute blast.

Nova: And thank you to all our listeners. Until next time, keep questioning the grid, embrace the chaos, and we'll see you in the next episode!