Why Fish Don't Exist

Chapter 6 begins with a description of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, that destroyed large sections of the city and killed three thousand people. The quake woke Jordan at 5:12am, and he quickly got his wife and children out of the house. Nearby, the Stanford campus was in shambles; Jordan raced over and ran to his lab, where he found his life’s work smashed to pieces. Specimens were scattered across the lab, many of them destroyed. Even specimens left intact were in crisis, “their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor” (77). Outside, he found the statue of his mentor, Louis Agassiz, thrown off his pedestal.

But instead of giving up—as Miller writes she would have done in this situation—Jordan turns to the solution with the sewing needle described at the outset of the book. First, he had his colleagues keep the smashed specimens wet with hoses “manned day and night” (79). Meanwhile, Jordan frantically tried to restore order to the university, comforting students and professors, while imploring suppliers to send ethanol for new specimen jars. Finally, the ethanol arrived, and Jordan and his team began trying to make order from chaos—if they didn’t, entire species would disappear from existence, detached from their names forever. In many cases, even where fish had names, Jordan could not remember what they were or where they had been found. Eventually, he found one he recognized—Evermannia panamensis, or Panama Goby, to which he applied his innovative technique of attached the nameplate with needle and thread, “[…] and boom, the creature would have popped back into existence” (81).

Miller describes herself as growing more desperate to understand what had motivated Jordan to keep working, as her own life grew increasingly chaotic. After three years, her former partner showed no signs of wanting to return. She left her job as a radio reporter and attended a graduate program in fiction writing, where she found herself often writing about the end of relationships. She then moved to Chicago, where she finally acknowledged what she calls the emptiness” in her life (83). Seeking answers, she turned to David Starr Jordan. 

In Chapter 7, Miller writes that she had copious material to work with in her search of answers, from Jordan’s memoir to his philosophical essays and even his fish-collecting guides. She starts with a children’s story about a lizard and an eagle caught in a cycle, whereby the lizard eats the eagle’s eggs in retaliation for the eagle eating the lizard’s snail. Many of Jordan’s stories following a similar narrative, Miller writes: “They portrayed a claustrophobic world in which the characters could not escape the cold rules of our universe” (87-88). In Jordan’s satires about ‘sciosophy’ (his dismissive word for spiritualist phenomena), he railed against magical thinking and the suffering and ignorance the flows from it—ignorance he attributes to an unwillingness to confront hard truths. These creeds made Jordan sound increasingly like her father, Miller notes. 

Miller then goes on to describe Jordan’s work on temperance—he condemned the use of alcohol and drugs because they created feelings of well-being and freedom that were not authentic—and on the role of activity in overcoming despair. This activity included “doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” as well as enjoying small pleasures, like the taste of a peach (89). Ultimately, Miller writes, Jordan believed despair was a choice, which causes Miller to feel shame about her own inability to be free from it. She discovers that he quotes the same words from Darwin that her father quoted: “there is grandeur in this view of life” (91). The revelation horrified Miller, who concluded Jordan had nothing new to offer her.

Miller describes instead turning to alcohol. One evening, after having a drink with her friend and telling that friend about her obsession with David Starr Jordan, the friend sent her an email saying Jordan’s will to persist sounded like Kafka’s Indestructible—“a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism” (92). Armed with this concept, Miller went back to Jordan’s work, and found a passage that was both inspiring, and a betrayal of Jordan’s own beliefs about the ultimate power of chaos: “For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates” (93). Miller concludes the chapter by noting that even an individual who rejected the practice of imbuing the universe of meaning was unable to resist the appeal of doing so.

Miller begins Chapter 8 by imagining Miller sweeping up his lab—destroyed by an earthquake—while telling himself that the will of man shapes fate and not the reverse. His self-delusion was shocking, she writes, but considering Jordan’s personal and professional successes, perhaps not an unreasonable approach to life.

Miller describes that for millennia, self-delusion was seen as a morally corrupt state, with the ancient Greeks and early Christians warning of the perils of hubris. Later, Enlightenment thinker Voltaire warned that optimism made one blind to suffering, and early pioneers of psychology believed self-delusion was a mental defect. But in the 1970s, psychologists began to note that the healthiest and most successful people seemed to possess a degree of self-delusion, believing themselves to be more attractive and competent than they were. The term ‘delusions’ was replaced with ‘positive illusions’ and psychologists began coaxing patients to adopt moderate shifts in perception, to see themselves in a more positive light. Such shifts made students more successful, workers more likely to show up on time, and traumatized people more at peace. Later, researchers such as Angela Duckworth noted that in successful people who were able to resist the temptation of despair and keep working at long-term objectives, there was consistently a trait she called ‘grit’: “Forget talent, creativity, kindness, IQ. Pure grit seemed to be the thing that would get you ahead” (101). Behind grit, Miller writes, are positive illusions.

Miller sees examples of this in Jordan’s life. He recast failures as signs of positive personal traits: for example, if he didn’t win university prizes, then in his mind this was because he was too creative, or too generous, or too ethical. Later, in his professional life, his positive self-image allowed him to dismiss criticisms of nepotism or negative perceptions of his associates. It worked well for Jordan, Miller writes, but notes that a team of researchers is now investigating whether there is any drawback to this way of living. These researchers have found that students tend to tire of peers with inflated self-esteem, even if drawn to them initially, and that overconfidence has negative consequences at work. In motherhood, or university, strong self-delusions helped people in the short-term but decreased their well-being over time. Moreover, inflated self-esteem can also lead to aggression, which can be seen in individuals that bully and gang up on others, and in nations prone to imperialistic aggression. Miller closes the chapter by noting that not all self-esteem is bad. Instead, it’s the self-esteem combined with a tendency to be easily threatened. Contemplating David Starr Jordan, Miller wonders which camp he fell into.