Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Agassiz, who warned that “science, generally, hates beliefs.”

species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believed to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our “convenience.” “Natura non facit saltum,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.

Imagine how troubling that would be to you if you were a taxonomist. Learning that the objects you held in your hands were not puzzle pieces after all, not clues, but products of randomness. They were not pages in a sacred text, not symbols in a holy code, not rungs on a divine ladder. They were snapshots of Chaos in motion.

building that houses the fish. We are greeted by a locked door. Covertly, one of the taxonomists punches in a key code and whirls us into a room that looks like a library, only instead of books on the shelves, there are jars. Big jars. Little jars. Each with at least one bloated corpse bobbing in yellowing liquid. A giant eel is accordioned into a glass barrel like a gargantuan piece of ribbon candy. A small jar full of minnows looks like a jar of capers. There are fish that look like scorpions, like Koosh balls, like old men, like tinfoil oragami. So odd to think this is what we came from. So odd to think that in embryonic form, we are nearly identical.

back to the water, back to sea, in search of more, more. When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century astronomer burned at the stake for believing Earth was not the center of the universe, as a hero. According to legend, before his execution Bruno quipped, “Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”

the problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and solve so many scientific puzzles—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally “die while the body is still alive.”

That which is in man is greater than all that he can do.

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

What does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species, of allowing it to endure into the future, to withstand the blows of Chaos in all her mighty forms—flood, drought, rising sea levels, fluctuating temperatures, invasions of competitors, predators, pests? Variation. Variation in genes, and hence in behavior and physical traits. Homogeneity is a death sentence. To rid a species of its mutants and outliers is to make that species dangerously vulnerable to the elements. In nearly every chapter of Origin, Darwin hails the power of “Variation.”

Darwin even goes out of his way to warn against meddling. The danger, as he sees it, is the fallibility of the human eye, our inability to comprehend complexity. Traits that might seem “abhorrent to our ideas of fitness” could actually be beneficial to a species or ecosystem, or could, in time, become beneficial as conditions change.

“Man can act only on external and visible characters; nature cares nothing for appearances.… She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.”

this arbitrary belief about how plants and creatures should be arranged?

source of laughter. A way of surviving one’s darkest years. This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

Your mom? Absolutely. A fish.

people will never exchange comfort for truth.I

That we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. That we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”

She nodded. She said she had sympathy for the fish, then. Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you tend to stop looking at it.

“Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”

“There is another world, but it is in this one,” says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats

Snorkel is best invention. God bless snorkel inventor. It win peace prize?

I realize that science itself is flawed. Not the beacon toward truth I had always thought it was, but a blunt tool that can wreak a lot of havoc along the way. Consider the word “order” itself. It comes from the Latin ordinem, to describe a row of threads sitting neatly in a loom. In time, it was extended as a metaphor to describe the way that people sit neatly under the rule of a king, general, or president. It was only applied to nature in the 1700s under the assumption—a human fabrication, a superimposition, a guess—that there is an orderly set of ranks to find there. I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.