#categorical anarchy! is kind of my overarching point

[veliseraptor]

I’m not an academic, is there a debate about fish as a category?? My only knowledge of fish discourse is Herman Melville raving in moby dick about why whales should be considered fish

that comes actually from the (delightful) book Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, who cites it from Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s book Naming Nature.

it’s an idea that comes from a notion of taxonomy that a) a legitimate evolutionary group must include all and only the descendants of a given ancestor, and b) a reliance on “shared evolutionary novelties” to identify relationships between species, and saying that the focus on fish as sharing a habitat and some qualities (scales, most obviously) obscures major differences between them. a scene she describes is about pointing out the ways in which a lungfish is more closely related to a cow than a salmon.

the point of my referencing this has to do with something about this quote (from the book):

The category of fish hides all this [difference]. Hides nuance. Discounts intelligence. It gerrymanders close cousins away from us, creating a false sense of separation to preserve our spot at the top of an imaginary ladder.

her point is, among other things, about not just the dangers of categorization but the ways that categorization that seems obvious can in fact be arbitrary and disguise other possible connections, which leads to people being potentially blind to those connections.

(I am probably simplifying all of this greatly, but that is the reference; “fish” as a category groups together a lot of animals that do not belong in the same bucket.)