Why Fish Don’t Exist (Simon & Schuster) is a 2020 non-fiction book by Lulu Miller, a science reporter and former co-host of Radiolab and National Public Radio’s Invisibilia. Miller explores the life and work of American scientist David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), mixing science writing with personal reflections. The book offers observations on scientific certainty, morality, and the nature of existence. Upon publication, the book was named a best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, and Audible.

Summary

David Starr Jordan was a prominent scientist and educator, the most important ichthyologist in America in his day. Miller begins Why Fish Don’t Exist with an anecdote from David Starr Jordan’s life that sparked her interest in his work. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed Jordan’s fish specimen collection, scattering the results of years of effort on the floor. Jordan responded to this catastrophe by carefully picking up all the pieces, sewing the nameplates back on to the fish, and carrying on with his work. When facing chaos in her own life, Miller turned to this anecdote, which she had dismissed when she first heard about it in her early twenties. She sets out to investigate what Jordan’s persistence and sense of purpose might be able to teach her.

In Chapter 1, Miller describes Jordan’s early life growing up on a farm in New York state. From an early age, he showed an interested in naming and categorizing the world around him, learning the names for all the stars in the sky. Although his mother discouraged this practice, Jordan persisted, learning the names for all the local flowers, including the ones considered ugly. The work of science is to investigate the hidden and insignificant, Jordan once wrote. As Jordan grew older, he applied this principle further, investigating the creatures hidden beneath the surface of the water. He’d first become interested in fish while undertaking training under Louis Agassiz on Penikese Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. There, he learned from Agassiz that nature was best observed directly—including by peering under the skin of animals—and that if examined closely, nature would reveal a divine plan. Agassiz invited Jordan on a dredging expedition, kicking off a lifetime of fish collecting that would see Jordan propelled to the highest levels of his field.

Meanwhile, in Chapter 3, Miller describes her own early life. At a young age, her scientist father gleefully informed her that there was no God, and that life was essentially meaningless. For her father, Miller writes, this realization was empowering; rather than depriving him of purpose, the notion “has instead pumped his life full of vigor” (36). But his approach to life also made it hard for him to understand Miller’s mental health struggles, and those of her eldest sister. At 16, Miller survived death by suicide; though she survived, she continued to be plagued with thoughts of ending her life. Yet when she entered college, things changed, in part because she met a man who offered a sense of refuge. After graduation, they moved to New York, where Miller began working as a producer on a science radio show. Then, after seven years together, Miller was unfaithful to her partner, and they broke up; in the aftermath, she was left struggling to maintain hope, and turned to David Starr Jordan, whose begrudging acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, early in his career, earned Miller’s trust.

After leaving Penikese Island, Jordan began a series of fish collecting expeditions, first across the Midwest, and then on the Pacific coast. In time, Jordan found a job as a professor at Indiana University and started a family. Eventually, he became the university’s president—the youngest in the country. Several years later, Leland and Jane Stanford hired Jordan to act as president of the university they’d just founded; Jordan accepted, despite his worries of being “controlled by the whims of two people whom he considered his moral and intellectual inferiors” (54). The resources the Stanfords provide allowed him to undertake ambitious collecting expeditions, although Jane Stanford’s ongoing interest in the study of spiritualism proved to be a thorn in Jordan’s side from an early stage in his presidency.

In Chapter 5, Miller describes a philosophical concept that the act of naming renders something real. The idea sounds mystical, but Miller compares it to holotypes—the first example of a named species, which are kept in jars in museums around the world, and can never be replaced, if lost. An astonishing number of fish holotypes were discovered by Jordan, one of whom—Agonomalus Jordani—he named after himself. But even his frenetic naming of species couldn’t keep chaos out of Jordan’s life. In 1900, his favorite child died of scarlet fever. Jane Stanford continued to question his leadership of the university. And in 1906, the San Francisco earthquake destroyed his specimen collection. That was the cataclysm that led to the anecdote from the start of the book, and Miller writes that as her own life continued to spiral out of control, she grew increasingly desperate to find out what in Jordan’s live “justified forward momentum on doomed missions” (83).

Seeking answers, Miller consults the abundant writings Jordan left behind, and found in them his conclusion that feeling despair was a choice—the same conclusion as her father. Searching further, she finds that for Jordan, despair could only be resisted if one believed in the power of human will to control the fates. In subsequent chapters, Miller finds further evidence of Jordan’s capacity for self-delusion, which researchers renamed ‘positive illusions’ in the 20th century. While some positive illusions allow people to be mentally healthy and to recover from setbacks, positive illusions coupled with a sense of superiority can produce dangerous results.

In Jordan, one of these results was his refusal to accept that Jane Stanford had died by poison, despite abundant evidence to support that hypothesis, and his steamrolling of any critiques of his own explanation of overexertion and overconsumption (a denial so determined that some suspect he was involved in her death). Another was his embrace of eugenics, of which he was an ardent supporter to the end of his life, despite moral and scientific critiques of the field. The policies that Jordan helped initiate would eventually lead to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people. But Jordan, convinced of his conclusions, failed to see how variation in genes was essential to the health of a species, nor did he display sympathy for those affected by eugenicist policies.

Despite the harm he directly and indirectly caused, Jordan died a celebrated man, and his influence is still felt today, a fact that feels unjust for Miller. Yet at the end of the book, she describes a cosmic retribution—the undoing of the evolutionary group of ‘fish’ by a group of scientists who examined the tree of life in the 20th century and concluded the category was false. For Miller, this realization ultimately proves to be a source of hope, and she concludes the book by noting that accepting uncertainty and learning to question received understanding of the world has provided richness and meaning to her life.