Why Fish Don't Exist

 

Any Good Books, April 2023

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

Lulu Miller (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Lulu Miller’s father is a cheerful nihilist. When she was about seven, she questioned him about the meaning of life. “He turned to me grinning and announced, ‘Nothing!’ It felt like he had been waiting eagerly, for my whole life, for me to finally ask.” No God, no destiny, no meaning. You don’t matter. “He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code, While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.” As a grown man, full of vim and bonhomie, he could afford to believe that Chaos is the bottom line, but this revelation had a depressing effect on his youngest daughter, causing her to wonder if her life was worth living at all.

Miller was attracted to the story of David Starr Jordan because he seemed like a man in whom Chaos might have met its match. He was a naturalist from his youngest days, on a farm in upstate New York, obsessively drawing and mapping the world around him. This was seen as an old-fashioned and even useless pursuit by his mother, who had a practical, Puritan turn of mind. But in 1873, when Jordan was twenty-two, he had a chance to spend the summer on a small, treeless island off the coast of Massachusetts, under the tutelage of Louis Agassiz. The great geologist proposed to get young scientists out of the classroom and into the natural world. On the shores of Penikese Island, on Buzzards Bay, Jordan found his life’s work: catching, preserving, and naming the world’s fish.

Agassiz promoted taxonomy as the study of how the living beings of the world could be ranked, to indicate the hierarchy dictated by God. He saw fit to use his own moral sentiments in the service of establishing the great ladder of being. “Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they ‘bestow greater care upon their offspring.’ Parasites, meanwhile, were clear lowlifes, the lot of them.”

The results of Jordan’s energetic collecting were first amassed at Indiana University, where he ascended to the presidency at the age of thirty-four. In 1890, Leland and Jane Stanford came to Bloomington to recruit Jordan to be the first president of their new university. In California, his collection continued to grow, until the earthquake of 1906 threw the whole thing to the floor, in a shower of broken glass. Miller was greatly inspired by the thought of Jordan picking up fish and sewing their tin labels onto them, so that when they were put back into new bottles, with fresh preservative, the crucial information would be preserved as well. Such a rebuke to Chaos! Such perseverance! Such grit!

Or, possibly, such hubris! In the aftermath of the earthquake, Jordan would write, “For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.” Is it? Really? Miller says that this “was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell himself. It was the kind of lie he had warned would lead to evil.” Which indeed it did, though Jordan would never see it that way. He was young enough to accept the principles of Darwin (as Agassiz never did), but also these of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton thought that if natural selection was good, selective breeding–of humans–would be better. “There’s a chance that eugenics could have remained in the realm of speculative fiction had a small group of influential scientists not championed its cause so zealously.” Jordan had the prestige and perseverence to make eugenics a much more powerful force in the United States that Galton would ever have managed without him. State after state passed laws permitting the sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit,’a category that inevitably reflected the prejudices of those making the determination. In Germany, the Nazis would read Jordan’s work, and defend their horrific acts as the natural outcome of scientific reasoning.

Miller points out that Jordan, like Galton and Agassiz, entirely missed Darwin’s point. In fact, it’s variation that gives all life its vigor. We use different tools for different jobs.“This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms.”

About those fish: drawing on the work of Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Miller explains that the category of ‘fish’ doesn’t work as an evolutionary category. A scientifically drawn tree of descent would show that sharks and eels and lungfish are more historically distinct from each other than they are from some land animals. If this idea threatens to unmoor us, it also frees us from the illusion of some cosmic moral order. Miller has “come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath.” A purpose to life, after all!