This was one of the books that was kindly sent to me by andtheIToldYouSos for Book Exchange last year, and I am rather sorry that I have waited until the last minute to review it—it has been a busy year.
Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life is a biography of a rather complex character I had not come across before, and why she sometimes connected with him. I perhaps should have heard of him before; David Starr Jordan was an ichthyologist, the founding president of Stanford University, and a researcher of some resilience. I was devastated in my PhD when I had to redo a whole year’s worth of work due to issues with my samples; Jordan had to start everything from scratch twice. The first time everything was destroyed in a fire; the second time he had his collections destroyed was in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906!
In searching for meaning and purpose in her own life Miller connected with two aspects of Jordan’s: as a taxonomist at heart, he was someone who naturally organizes the world into categories. As a researcher with such a tumultuous career, he learned how to persist. Miller then goes and to use concepts from fish taxonomy to try and answer life’s great questions—a direction I was not expecting from the book when I first picked it up.
However, as it turns out, David Starr Jordan is a less-than-perfect role model. The man had a very messy life, alongside his love for fish classification. His time as the first president of Stanford was seriously marred by the fact that he may have been involved with covering up the true cause of Jane Stanford’s death… I can’t say I saw that coming. Jordan was pretty adamant about going with the narrative that she died of a heart attack, but everything else pointed to strychnine poisoning. For those of you that are not aware the two causes of death do NOT resemble each other. And Miller considers Jordan a likely suspect in Stanford’s probable murder. How I’ve never heard about this story before, I do not understand!
But unlike his first controversy, however, I absolutely saw Jordan’s second one coming. It’s just something you come to expect when you’re reading about a natural scientist from the turn of the 20th century. It’s almost unavoidable during this period; it’s a subject that even my own Alma Mater has had to contend with
Jordan was big into eugenics.
Much of his belief framework can be traced back to his mentor, Louis Agassiz, and his misapplication of hierarchies. A lot of these early taxonomists with a great love of order fell victim to eugenic ideals. Many early geneticists fell into the same flawed patterns of thinking as well. If you are not familiar with the role the US had in the early genetics movement in the 20th century, you will get a brief introduction here. Despite her earlier fondness for Jordan, Miller is not shy about confronting this part of his legacy and shows this by interviewing a victim of America’s eugenics policies.
He drank the eugenics Kool-Aid hard and fast. Indeed
As for the title of the book? While Jordan spent much of his career classifying species and misclassifying people, the great irony of it all is that there is no such thing as fish—not from a cladist’s standpoint— ‘fish’ is not a monophyletic taxon.
Haha, woops!
I have to say why enjoyed this book very much, it is very unusual and not at all what I expected when I started reading.
