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

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0961754x-9809305

1538-4578

Oren Harman,

Conservation, Ecology, Wildlife Education

When the imposing natural historian Louis Agassiz established a summer camp for fledgling biologists on Penikese Island off the coast of Massachusetts in 1873, he set out to provide his underlings with proper guidance. Every species is a “thought of God,” the towering Swiss told the first cohort of aspirants, and nature is a sacred text. It is therefore the job of the taxonomist to “translate into human language . . . the thoughts of the Creator.” These thoughts convey a clear hierarchy in nature, with the white European man at the top, but other creatures had their place as well. If only students would pay attention, even a dandelion could offer them moral guidance.Among the first cohort on the island was twenty-two-year-old David Starr Jordan of Gainesville, New York, and he was hooked. He would go on to make the naming of new species of fish his lifetime work, placing thousands yet unknown to science on the Tree of Life and becoming America's greatest ichthyologist. But Jordan would need to fight adversity on his way to the top: his bottled collection of slimy holotype specimens was hit by lightning, ravaged by fire, and then, after having been reconstructed, more or less annihilated by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.The resolve Jordan exhibited in the face of such bad luck (“Despair is a choice!”) would later inspire a young American radio producer and writer by the name of Lulu Miller, who had set out to search for order in the chaos of her own life. She had cheated on her boyfriend and been dumped, was experimenting with her sexuality, pursuing meaning in a world governed by inevitable entropy, and trying to figure out how to find love. Who better than a dead ichthyologist as a moral guide (“I was desperate,” she writes, “to discover the precise line in David Starr Jordan's scripture that justified forward momentum on doomed missions”). But as Miller delved deeper into Jordan's biography, seeking a rudder, she discovered a dark side: his early and influential championing of eugenics at the turn of the twentieth century in America (“for a race of men and a race of cattle are governed by the same laws of selection”), and, quite amazingly, his involvement in the possible murder of his boss. Jane Stanford and her robber baron husband, Leland, a US senator and former governor, had endowed a new university in California, and invited the up-and-coming Jordan to become its first president in 1891. But after Leland's death, the president of Stanford University fell out of favor with Leland's diminutive wife, until she died mysteriously in Hawaii after eating one too many salami and cheese sandwiches, just before ordering Jordan's outright dismissal.Miller's hero, in other words, morphs, as we read along, into a villain. As she reels from the blow (really?), trying to mend a broken heart, she is forced to reconsider the possibility that humans can never fight the second law of thermodynamics, however hard they try to take control of their lives. Nor can they do so by foolheartedly trying to order nature. True freedom, it turns out, stems from obliterating the real and metaphorical Scala Naturae, from absolving ourselves of the felt yet untenable impulse to force structure and system on a universe with no telos or rule, and instead experience it.From what does this deep insight emerge? From cladistics—how could it be otherwise? That system of ordering groups in nature, based on common ancestry rather than the shared characteristics of numerical taxonomy, was developed by the German Willi Hennig in 1950, and it put the lie (posthumously) to Jordan's life. After all, cladistics makes clear that there is no coherent category that we might call fish: “Birds exist,” Miller writes. “Mammals exist. Amphibians exist. But fish, in particular, do not exist.” Of course, we can call all kinds of slimy, swimming, tailed, and scaled creatures fish, but according to cladistics to do so is like making a category of all mammals that are loud. If Dr. Jordan had only known the “dandelion principle”—whereby in some contexts a dandelion can be considered a weed to be culled, in others a medical herb to be valued and cultivated—if only he had not adopted Agassiz's deeply racist theological creed—he might have been free to see nature in all its splendor. He would have known what Lulu Miller has found in her journey of discovery: there can never be a single way of classifying things in this world. “In every organism on which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend,” she writes, having found her deliverance (and, by the way, also the love of her life). This, after all, was “Darwin's creed.”The history and philosophy of science have finally met the millennials. Passionate for learning, open and adaptive to change, challenging of hierarchies and the status quo, freethinking and creative, set on making the world better through personal fulfillment, and obsessed with authenticity and meaningfulness—and with themselves—millennials are now reinterpreting everything from sexuality to race relations to the science of taxonomizing fish. It is fascinating, and also a little scary, to be along for the ride.As it turns out, David Starr Jordan has been a prop all along, an idiosyncratic excuse. Nor does it really seem to matter that scholars have toiled on these historical episodes and philosophical pursuits since well before Miller's journey of discovery. Cladistics is confusedly marshaled to argue against the ordering of nature, but even that seems beside the point. For in some strangely naive and sweet way, using the history and philosophy of science to construct a self-help book emerges as a new way to make them relevant. Now hipsters in Brooklyn know something about David Starr Jordan, the famously forgotten, disgraced ichthyologist who died in 1931. There is a childishness to smile at, while reading this book, but only at the risk of missing something more fundamental. Our gaze on the world is changing, and with it the world itself.