Ever the disciple of his prophet Louis Agassiz, David examined the organisms he was encountering for moral instruction. He had taken Agassiz’s foggy idea of “degeneration,” mashed it up with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and ran with it. He saw the slimy hagfish as evidence that “bad habits” such as sloth or parasitism could make a species degenerate, devolve, or “change for the worse.” In a scientific paper, David proposed that the sea squirt, a sedentary sac of a filter feeder, had once been a higher fish but had “degraded” into its current form due to a combination of “idleness,”
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