When I opened science reporter Lulu Miller’s luminous historical account of David Starr Jordan’s life, “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” I believed that fish existed, and I had never heard of David Starr Jordan, even though I grew up in a town where buildings, streets, and rivers bore his name. But then, when Miller began the research for her book, she also believed fish existed, and Jordan, renowned ichthyologist and Stanford University's first president, was just a faint glimmer on her laptop screen, preserved in the amber of a sepia-toned photograph. When Miller stumbled upon his image, Jordan was another “old white man with a bushy walrus mustache” who seemed to believe that, against all odds, the world could be ordered. To Miller’s searching, scientific mind, this idea of order was tremendously appealing. 

In the first chapter of her book, Miller recounts how, when she was seven years old, she inquisitively asked her father about the Meaning Of Life. His response, which he’d been saving in his back pocket to impart to his daughter whenever this very curiosity struck was: “Nothing!” Miller writes, “Chaos, he informed me, was our only ruler. This massive swirl of dumb forces was what made us, accidentally, and would destroy us, imminently.” And while Miller respects her father and acknowledges his wisdom, she is unable to surrender to chaos as her only ruler. And so, she sets out for answers. 

Answers unfurl through the pages of “Why Fish Don’t Exist, A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life.” On the surface, the book appears to narrate Jordan’s meandering career and futile attempts to discover and catalog the world’s fish. And despite multiple natural disasters—an earthquake that shook countless glass jars containing his specimens from their shelves and decimated his collection, a fire that burned his meticulous records along with his sense of order—Jordan managed to identify and categorize one fifth of the fish we know today. But while Jordan’s story is the backdrop, the more salient narrative is that of the author, Miller herself; she takes us on a journey to uncover a scientific history not widely known and proves herself to be a woman scientist with meticulous, investigative research skills that far outclass Jordan’s. 

At first, Miller seems to draw inspiration from Jordan’s perseverance in spite of the world’s chaos, and she combs through his archives in awe of his arrogant desire to order the world. She hypothesizes that Jordan's perspective might be the answer to her unhappiness, might alleviate the unease she experiences at the thought that entropy is growing and can never be diminished. His ordering principles might offer the key to her failed relationship, her depression, the feeling that she doesn’t fit in. But when she holds a magnifying glass up to Jordan’s purported order, it begins to crumble.

Miller discovers that Jordan’s understanding of order was rooted in eugenics, an 1883 coinage by British scientist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. Jordan became obsessed with Galton’s ideas and believed that “undesirable” traits had to be rooted out of the population, lest humans devolve. Miller writes that “as early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fervor, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University.” Having grown up in Bloomington, Indiana, home to Indiana University, I was horrified to learn that this academic institution became Jordan’s bully pulpit to propagate his toxic, backwards ideas promoting extermination of those declared “unfit” to procreate. With Indiana leading the immoral charge in 1907, a wave of states successfully legalized forced eugenic sterilization. Many people were violated against their will, robbed of their bodily agency, their futures changed dramatically, in the name of science. The vast majority of those deemed unfit were women of color. 

Miller admits her own incomplete understanding of our country’s sordid history in the eugenics movement, and writes, “I can’t believe I made it through my entire education without ever learning about our country’s leading role in the eugenics movement.” But she attempts to correct for this, excavating facts long buried beneath the sea floor and telling the almost-forgotten stories of women subjected to forced sterilization. She highlights a history that has been deliberately omitted from our education, a history that, spurred by Jordan’s eugenicist fervor, is still unfolding through discriminatory practices and federal legislation that has yet to be overturned. Miller points to the nonconsensual sterilization of women in California prisons between 2006-2010 as one example of the clandestine forced sterilizations that are still occurring today.

Other unsavory facets of Jordan’s life and personality come into focus as Miller investigates further. Jordan seemed to have had a hand in covering up the likely murder of Jane Stanford, philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University, along with her husband Leland Stanford. Jordan fired anyone who deigned to question his authority as Stanford University’s president. At any accusations of cronyism, he claimed his friends were the best scientists in the world, so he need not bother reading other applications. Jordan twisted facts and reframed situations to portray himself in the most flattering light. In doing so, he erased stories, closed doors, and destroyed lives that Miller does the important work of trying to unearth and share. This is the work of a scientist. 

In the course of her investigation, Miller learns that the classification of “fish as a creature” is faulty—it doesn’t provide meaningful information about how species are related, and it collapses an ocean of nuance into a single inaccurate term. Ironically, Jordan’s own meticulous classification of fish precipitated this rupture in organizing the tree of life. His detailed taxonomy of a diversity of so-called fish led researchers to discover that some of the creatures that swim the seas are more closely related to mammals than to each other. The category of “fish” is only helpful in its identification that these creatures live in water; their relationships to each other and their order in the tree of life are governed by their “shared evolutionary novelties”—their characteristics, not their habitat. And yet, the term “fish” remains part of our common usage. 

Cladists know that fish do not exist. Historians record that the U.S. pioneered the eugenics movement. But most people reading this book will not know these narratives that run counter to the ones told by Jordan. When she began her own research, Miller herself did not know them, but she never shies away from not having answers.

Miller asks us as readers to be curious about what we will find when we “give up the fish,” when we dismantle the “order” perpetuated by old white men in sepia photographs, an order that has marginalized so many, that has erased women and people of color from history, and that still continues to inflict harm in the name of science. And she begins to answer those questions for herself. With more complex understanding, Miller rejects Jordan’s frame of classification and finds that the previous structures that held up her world were holding her back. When Miller gives up the fish, she finds the freedom to be herself in a more inclusive world of science. 

Miller breaks the surface tension that has kept Jordan’s legacy afloat and perpetuated our broken classification systems. Beneath this placid layer of deceptively engineered order and systematically sanitized history, she introduces us to a vibrant world rich with life and multitudes of “fish” still to be discovered, deep in the wild unknown. Miller hands us a pair of goggles and invites us to gaze into an aquamarine abyss and explore it for ourselves. 

Image credit: Aquarium by Divya Thakur, August 23, 2008 (Flickr | CC BY-SA 2.0)