Why Fish Don't Exist

In Chapter 1, Miller writes that David Jordan was born in 1851 in New York state and was interested in ordering nature from a young age, learning all the names of the stars in the night sky (for which he was allowed to choose ‘Starr’ for his middle name). From here, Jordan turned to more terrestrial concerns, and mapped as much of his family’s farm as he could. Miller writes that Jordan was out of step with the times in this preoccupation. The early modern interest in taxonomy had started to wane in the 19th century because so much of the world had been discovered, or so people thought. Jordan was also out of alignment with his mother, who destroyed his maps. But the boy was undeterred and continued to learn the scientific names of plants he encountered, sometimes in the company a farmer named Joshua Ellenwood who knew the scientific names for all the plants in the region. Then, at age 11, he lost his brother Rufus to typhus. In the aftermath, Jordan pursued the naming of nature with even more passion and went on to study science at Cornell University. His passion for taxonomy was still of marginal interest to broader society, however, and Miller closes the chapter by noting that he would have remained in obscurity, had he not gone to Penikese Island.

Penikese Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, has been many things: a leper colony, bird sanctuary, a reform school for wayward boys. In the present day, it is an addiction recovery center, but in David Starr Jordan’s time, it was a site of interest for naturalists concerned with the state of their trade. In the late 19th century, Louis Agassiz, a leading Swiss naturalist, was concerned that science had moved away from direct observation of the natural world. When a wealthy landowner offered to donate Penikese Island to create a training camp for young naturalists, he seized the opportunity. Soon, Jordan, who was living in Illinois by then, found out about Agassiz’s “Course of Instruction in Natural History to be Delivered By the Seaside,” applied, and was accepted (21). Once on the Island, Agassiz explained to the young students that they were searching for God in nature, believing “the work of taxonomy is literally to “translat[e] into human language…the thoughts of the Creator” (25).

Miller explains that for Agassiz, nature contained a moral code written into the hierarchy of species, explaining that such an idea has a history that dates back at least as far as Aristotle, who thought all organisms could be arranged in a ladder, with humans at the top. For Agassiz, this hierarchy was most visible under the skin: “Agassiz explained that the best way to get to God was with a scalpel. To split the skin and look inside” (26). By closely examining nature, Agassiz thought humans could derive lessons about how to behave in the most morally correct way—including the lessons that descending to the level of beasts is possible, if one did not act in a morally upstanding way. 

In the final section of the chapter, Miller recreates Jordan’s first night on the island, lying in the dormitory where female and male attendees were only separated by a piece of sailcloth. In a prank, some male students threw their bedding over a rafter. In response, Agassiz sent six men home, but Jordan was not among them because he had been selected to participate in the first dredging mission, collecting fish from the ocean—an act that would set off a lifetime of scientific inquiry. 

Miller starts Chapter 3 musing if Cape Cod is “fertile ground for existential transformation,” given the fundamental shift in worldview she experienced while visiting the area—which is a short distance from Penikese Island—with her family, as a child. Gazing out at the marsh, Miller asked her father about the meaning of life. In response, her father, who was “a lively man, a biochemist with shaky hands who studies ions, the particles that carry the electricity that powers all life,” told her that there wasn’t one, nor was there a God (34). Instead, he said, there was only chaos.

From here, Miller goes on to describe her father, who often ignores rules and recipes, enjoys pranks and drinks large amounts of beer. He nonetheless lives by a moral code, Miller says—to treat people as though they matter, even if they don’t, and therefore often invited students from his university classes to share meals or stay with the family. Miller writes that she has tried to live by his example, “to stare out pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it” (36). Nonetheless, she struggled to do so; as a child, she saw her oldest sister bullied so intensely she dropped out of high school. In time, Miller had a similar experience, as her classmates made fun of her clothes and mocked her appearance. For their father, this struggle was a source of impatience and frustration. At 16, Miller no longer saw any relief on the horizon. She overdosed on sleeping pills. Later, waking up in the hospital, she vowed next time to “do it right” (39).

Yet once in college, things started to improve. One day, Miller writes that she saw a sign of hope in a man she slowly befriended, and ultimately formed a romantic relationship with. After graduation, they moved to Brooklyn together where Miller began producing a radio show about science. She writes that the home they built together formed the kind of refuge she thought would never exist. Seven years into their relationship, Miller was unfaithful to her partner, and he told her it was over. Miller was initially consumed by a sense of meaningless. She beat back that tide by writing letters and emails to her former partner, turning to Jordan as a model of persistence.

Miller writes that the religious nature of Jordan’s experiences on Penikese Island were a source of concern for her because she is an atheist. Ultimately, though, she identified with Jordan’s embrace of Charles Darwin, who had become a hugely influential figure by the time Jordan was working. Darwin questioned the division of species into inflexible categories, as his work on evolution showed they were more mutable than anyone believed. While people like Louis Agassiz rejected this notion, Jordan reluctantly embraced it, following the path of science, for which Miller writes she felt she could “could keep using him as my guide” (43).

Chapter 4 opens with Miller describing Jordan beginning to focus on freshwater fish, even as he moved from job to job in the Midwest. Along with a former classmate named Herbert Copeland, Miller began focusing on the connections between species. Eventually, Jordan was hired by the government to travel to new states, in search of undiscovered fish species, including in 1880, when he was sent to the Pacific Coast, to catalogue fish species there as part of the US Census. While there, he became interested in marine species like tuna and flying fish, and he advanced a theory that combined Darwin’s discoveries of evolution with Agassiz’s ideas about moral degeneration. Jordan speculated that a species known as the sea squirt had devolved from a fish thanks to “a combination of “idleness,” “inactivity and dependence” (49). Jordan also studied the people and other species around him, adopting their fishing techniques into his own practices. As a result, he identified eighty new species of trip on that trip.

Soon afterwards, Jordan became a professor science at Indiana University. He married Susan Bowen, who had also attended the naturalist camp on Penikese Island, and the couple went on to have three children. Then, after six years of teaching, Jordan was named president of the university—a rapid rise in influence and status that Miller attribute to Jordan’s ‘Purpose.’ But Jordan was not without setbacks. In 1883, Miller writes that a lightning strike led to fire in Jordan’s lab. The jars of fish species that he had collected exploded—“Every last specimen was destroyed” (51). A document Jordan had been working on that mapped the tree of life was also destroyed. Yet Jordan didn’t linger on his grief. Instead, he quickly resumed collecting.

When his wife Susan was killed by pneumonia, he bounced back in a similar way and even remarried to a younger woman named Jessie Knight, who joined him on his collecting trips (after sending his eldest children to boarding school). In time, Jordan was recruited by a wealthy couple, Leland and Jane Stanford, who were starting a new academic institution in Palo Alto, California—Stanford University. Just as he turned forty, Jordan became the school’s founding president. In front of the new building that Jordan had built as a seaside observatory, there was a statue of Jordan’s mentor, Louis Agassiz, even though Agassiz was a proponent of “one of the most hateful and destructive fallacies in scientific history,” the belief that human races are different species and that some races—namely, Black people—were subhuman (55).

Meanwhile, Jordan and his new wife moved into a small cottage near the laboratory along with a menagerie of pets. In time, they also had two children, including a daughter named Barbara, considered by Jordan his ‘most lovable’ child (57). He also embarked on increasingly ambitious collecting expeditions to places as far away as Samoa, Switzerland, and Japan. These trips were criticized by Jane Stanford, who wanted Jordan to spend less time studying fish and more time studying spiritualism. Jordan resisted these entreaties—“one of his favorite pastimes was debunking mediums,” Miller writes—and this resistance caused increasing conflict with Jane Stanford (58). At the close of the chapter, Miller writes that as a protection against the indignities of this struggle, Jordan sought comfort in fish.