Book Report: Why Fish Don't Exist

29. Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (2020) (10/22/2020)

This is simply a delightful book. On the surface, it is (or rather, begins as) a biography of David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), a taxonomist and discoverer of some 20 percent of the fish species known to us, as well as the first president of Stanford University. But it is also a memoir, as Lulu attempts to make sense of the meaningless-ness of . . . it all—a lesson taught to her as a young girl by her scientist father when, to her question "What is the meaning of life?" he responds, "Nothing." 

Chaos, he informed me, was our only ruler. This massive swirl of dumb forces was what made us, accidentally, and would destroy us, imminently. It cared nothing for us, not our dreams, our intentions our most virtuous of actions.

And so, when she discovers Jordan and his quest to make sense of the chaos of the natural world, she finds a potential mentor. Possibly a savior. For sure, an obsession.

She also finds a very problematic soul. Jordan was entranced with fish, yes, but he also, maybe, was involved in the death of his benefactor Leland Stanford's wife by poisoning (or at least a cover-up of said), and he certainly, until his dying day, was a proponent of eugenics. A disturbing chapter in this book, "A Veritable Chamber of Horrors," outlines the US's long involvement in that abhorrent policy, and the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of "unfit" people. (Something that still goes on.)

In her quest to understand Jordan, Miller comes to understand that dogmatism—as in her father's "Nothing matters," as in Jordan's belief that all creation can be placed somewhere on a "ladder" from lesser to better, degenerate to perfect, unworthy to worthy—is wrong, and that in fact there are so very many ways to look at and appreciate reality. What you consider unimportant, I might consider useful, or valuable, or even precious. And that does matter.  

It was the dandelion principle! 
 To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it's a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it's a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it's sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.
 And so it must be with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspec-tives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia [home of a victim of the eugenics project whom Miller interviewed], that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one's darkest years.
 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. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life." The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer behind intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.
 . . . At long last, I had found it, a retort to my father. We matter, we matter. In tangible, concrete ways human beings matter to this planet, to society, to one another. It was not a lie to say so. Not a sappy cop-out or a sin. It was Darwin's creed! It was, conversely, a lie to say only that we didn't matter and keep it at that. That was too gloomy. Too rigid. Too shortsighted. Dirtiest word of all: unscientific.

The book's title is explained in the final chapter, and it concerns the "undoing," if you will, of David Starr Jordan and his obsession with naming fish. For according to the current approach to biological classification known as cladistics, there really is no such thing as "fish"; rather, there are various groups of creatures that happen to live underwater but otherwise don't necessarily share much evolutionary history. This part of the book, a single chapter, was too brief to treat the full complexity of this heady topic (me, I'll probably be accepting the notion of fish until my dying day), but it led into a beautiful meditation on the necessity of remaining open-minded, open-hearted, undogmatic, ready for any kind of delight.

I loved this book. I could see opening it tomorrow at page one and starting right in again. But, I've got too many other books to read at the moment. Well, for the rest of my life. And more arriving all the time! Yeah.

Oh, and a P.S.: each chapter was fronted by an exquisite scratchboard illustration by artist Kate Samworth. Here are a few of them (click on them to see large on black):

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Today's Covid-19 stats for Monterey County, compared with those from the last time I posted them, on the 18th: total cases, 11,284 vs. 11,022 (up 262); hospitalizations, 658 vs. 645 (up 13); deaths, 87 vs. 83 (up 4). Maybe maybe maybe we're slowing down? 

Stay well. Be open-minded and open-hearted. It's the only way to be, really. Too bad a good chunk of this country doesn't seem to know how . . .