Why Fish Don't Exist

Miller writes that Jordan’s authority at Stanford University waned following Jane Stanford’s death. The university’s board of trustees was unhappy with Jordan’s decision to fire Stanford’s informant, Julius Goebel, and they took away Jordan’s power to dismiss faculty. A few years later, they asked him to step down. With the new flexibility in his schedule, Jordan found new pastimes. For years, he’d been interested in an Italian town he had encountered on his fish collecting trips, known as Aosta, where the Catholic church provided shelter and support to people with physical and mental disabilities. “He worried that it was proof of that thing Louis Agassiz had suggested could take place in the animal world: degeneration” (128). In Jordan’s mind, simple, immobile creatures like barnacles were once fish, but ‘degenerated’ from parasitizing other beings. Jordan saw a similar process happening in Aosta, and with more time to pursue a new project, he began working on a book about eugenics.

The term ‘eugenics’ had been coined by a British scientist named Francis Galton in 1883, a term derived from the Greek words for “good” and “birth.” Inspired by the work of his cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton argued that a ‘master race’ of humans could be created through selective breeding. Jordan quickly became an early supporter, endorsing the idea that inheritance could explain almost all human traits. Jordan had lectured on these ideas to his university students and elaborated on them in books. In speaking tours, he promoted the sterilization of the ‘unfit.’ Jordan and others managed to pass a law on forced eugenic sterilization in Indiana, and a short time later, in California. Soon, these laws spread across the country as eugenics became a part of American intellectual and popular culture.  One author, Madison Grant, argued for rounding up all of America’s “moral perverts, mental defectives and hereditary cripples,” and subjecting them to forced sterilization (132).

Nonetheless, many disagreed, both on the grounds that these policies were inhumane and on scientific grounds. Scientists pointed out that in On the Origin of Species, Darwin underscores the importance of variability—meaning genetic diversity—in ensuring a strong species. But Jordan was not convinced by these arguments, and he doubled down on his promotion of eugenics. He convinced a wealthy friend to donate the equivalent of $13 million to create a pro-eugenics research center that attempted to prove that poverty, dishonesty, and other traits could be explained by inheritance. Evidence from that centre was later used in a 1927 Supreme Court case involving a woman named Carrie Buck, who had been sent to a clinic run by a eugenicist named Albert Priddy, and she was facing mandatory sterilization. The judges sided with the clinic. In subsequent decades, American doctors sterilized 60,000 people in the name of public welfare, many of them Black, Indigenous or the children of immigrants. Miller closes the chapter by noting that even though every state has repealed its sterilization laws, forced sterilizations continue in the United States, and the statues of those who promulgated the underlying beliefs—including Francis Galton and Louis Agassiz—are in prominent positions across the country. 

Miller opens Chapter Eleven by describing how Jordan never gave up his eugenicist beliefs. This, combined with the people he harmed in pursuit of his ambition, leaves Miller feeling sick: “I had been fashioning myself after a villain, after all” (143). Miller goes on to ask how a boy who dedicated himself to appreciating the insignificant had come to do so much harm to vulnerable people. She concludes that the culprit was Jordan’s extreme self-confidence and optimism. Even though Jordan publicly denounced self-delusion, he clung to his own, which Miller writes had started in Penikese Island, where Louis Agassiz shared his belief of a divine ladder found in nature. This belief gave Jordan’s work meaning, Miller says, transforming what had been a shameful pastime into a pursuit of the utmost importance. Following this ladder could lead to enlightenment, and any moment where humanity started to fall off the ladder called for condemnation in the strongest possible terms.

Even after Darwin debunked the notion of a divine plan in nature—and Jordan accepted this conclusion—Jordan continued to believe in a hierarchy in nature and in the moral rightness of eugenicist practices that flowed from that belief. He held on to this belief even when other scientists denounced it. He also refused to recognize in nature that humans have no place at the top of the hierarchy and are out-performed by animals on nearly every measure one can think of: When you examine the range of life on Earth, “it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top” (146). Nonetheless, Miller concludes that Jordan retained his belief in hierarchy because it allowed him to create order out of chaos and from the conclusion that one does not matter. As much as she rejects his beliefs, Miller writes that she understands the impulse.

Miller concludes the chapter by noting that she’d chosen to stop lying to herself: Her former partner was not coming back, David Starr Jordan was not going to serve as a model for a better life, and there was no way of hiding from chaos. 

At the beginning of Chapter 12, Miller describes the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which she visited a few years before it was permanently closed. It had previously served for years as an “internment camp” for people deemed unfit in the eyes of eugenicists. Miller describes exploring the building, fallen into disrepair, where Carrie Buck had been sterilized. While Buck herself died in 1983, Miller was able to speak with another survivor of the facility, a woman named Anna. Anna was also forcibly sterilized, in 1967 when she was 19. She had lived at the facility since she was seven, when she was taken into care by state workers because concerned neighbors saw her and her brother playing naked outside their home. At the facility, she was abused, raped, and forced to work. She often caried for other inmates, taking on the role of a mother. When she was offered a chance to leave the facility if she agreed to be sterilized, Miller writes that “[…] she refused to give her captors the one part of her identity she wanted to keep for herself, Mother” (155). Meanwhile, she continued to mother other prisoners, including a young girl named Mary. Then, when Anna was 19, a nurse told her that she was getting a checkup. They placed a mask over her face, and when she woke up, she had a scar on her stomach and was soon allowed to leave.

Miller goes on to describe Anna’s current home: a two-bedroom apartment a short distance away from the facility, where she has lived with Mary for the past decade. Mary managed to avoid sterilization and had a son. She and Anna remained close, and Anna helped look after the child, even though she couldn’t have children of her own. She has taken care of many people and animals in her life, as well as a doll she calls Little Mary. Leaving their apartment, which Miller calls “a menagerie of movement, and life, laughter and warmth,” she reflects on the fact that people following the same line of thinking as David Starr Jordan deemed Anna and Mary to be unworthy lives (158). For Miller, the value of these lives is in the small—and sometimes big—ways they support one another. This is not the ‘mattering’ of eugenics, where whether something matters hinges on its capacity for perfection. Instead, the kind of mattering that interests Miller is reflected in the Dandelion Principle; from some perspectives, a dandelion is a weed, but from others, it’s a source of medicine, or a crucial piece of habitat. In other words, there are concrete and identifiable ways in which human beings matter to one another. Miller describes feeling heartened by the realization, but she closes the chapter by noting that this understanding still leaves the problem of how to reconcile oneself to an uncaring universe.

In the final chapter of Why Fish Don’t Exist, Miller describes Jordan’s death, at home at age 80, and how he was celebrated after his passing by schoolchildren and by scientists. On Stanford’s campus, there are portraits of him and buildings bearing his name. His name also adorns lakes in the United States, a government ship, and over a hundred species of fish. Of the 12,000-15,000 fish known today, Jordan and his team discovered roughly 2,500 of them. Miller considers the fact that Jordan used immigrant labor and people of color to find his fish, in some cases using intimidation to force people to hand over fish that they had caught. Yet Jordan’s reputation survives to this day mostly untarnished, which Miller says reflects “an uncaring world with no sense of cosmic justice encoded anywhere in its itchy, meaningless fabric” (170). She finds hope, however, in a curious idea that a group of scientists called cladists have developed: namely, that fish don’t exist.

Miller describes reading about the idea in a book called Naming Nature by Carol Kaseuk Yoon. In it, Yoon describes her encounter with scientists in the field of cladistics who were determined to reconsider the tree of life without giving in to the foibles of human intuition. Instead, cladists proposed grouping species according to descent from an evolutionary novelty. If one could trace various beings back to an ancestor that introduced some particular novelty, then one could place these various beings in the same evolutionary group. This led to surprising discoveries: Bats are more closely related to camels than they are to rodents; whales are in the same family as deer. It also led researchers to conclude that fish do not exist as a true evolutionary category. Fish, despite the fact they all live in the water, are hugely varied and often very different from one another. Following the cladists, it makes no more sense to hold on to the category of ‘fish’ than it does to say all beings found on a mountaintop are part of a group called ‘mish,’ Miller writes.

Miller then goes on to describe asking fish scientists about whether they accept this. She finds they do, although even people like Carol Kaeusk Yoon said that the process of getting to that point was painful. Miller also writes the David Starr Jordan himself likely would have accepted it, although it would have been difficult—a suffering Miller says is satisfying to imagine.

From here, Miller goes on to ask why this line of inquiry matters. She concludes that encouraging people to abandon their certainties and to accept some doubt is a way of letting go over hierarchies and accepting complexity—which could ultimately prove to be a more compassionate way of looking at other species and at each other. It opens the door to a more expansive way of experiencing the world, Miller writes. She concludes by describing her family’s response to the idea. Her father can accept that “fish” is scientifically inaccurate, but he says he’s too old to be freed from the category. Her sister, on the other hand, accepts it easily. Having been misunderstood for much of her life, she understands intimately how people get things wrong. 

In the epilogue, Miller starts by describing how she realized she needed to leave her friend’s apartment in Chicago, and “step back in the Chaos and see what happened” (185). She moved to Washington DC and found a temporary job at NPR, where she feared people could see she was incompetent and a bad person. One day, while out for a run in a park, she had a vision of curtains featuring the same images of plants and animals she saw before her and realized the intuitive ordering of the life around her was also a veil.

But for Miller, the ability to fully see past this veil came when she met a woman shortly after the run. “She was younger than me. Shorter than me. She was a girl. Many things that did not fit my criteria for a “mate” (187). To see this person, Miller writes that she’d had to let go of her hope for a reunion with her ex-boyfriend, but also had to surrender her preconceived notions of who she needed to end up with (namely, a man). This woman challenged Miller, beating Miller when they raced bikes, and she impressed Miller with her facility with language.

Then, after six months together, they took a trip to Bermuda together. There, Miller’s girlfriend encouraged her to try a snorkel, and when she dipped her head into the water, Miller found fish “like nothing I had ever seen” (189). The variety of fish was immense, including many Miller did not know the names of—but she knew they were not fish. Meanwhile, Miller’s girlfriend removed her bathing suit bottom to swim unencumbered. It was in that moment that Miller writes she knew a life with that person was what she wanted.

At the close of the book, Miller writes that when she experiences difficult moments now, she thinks of fish and the fact that fish don’t exist—what else does this mean we have yet to learn about the world, she asks. By surrendering the notion of fish, she says, she’s found a reason for hope—to not run from chaos, but to embrace it and to see that the good that is an essential part of chaos itself. By giving up the illusion of order, Miller writes that she can see science for what it is: “Not the beacon toward truth I had always thought it was, a blunt tool that can wreak a lot of havoc along the way” (193). Order can be a sort of constraint, Miller concludes, on ourselves and on others, writing that  it is our life’s work to tear it down.