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

by Lulu Miller

“There is grandeur in this view,” scolds a quote from Darwin hanging over my dad’s desk at his lab. The words are written in looping brown calligraphy, enclosed in a varnished wooden frame. The quote comes from the last sentence of On the Origin of Species. It is Darwin’s sweet nothing, his apology for deflowering the world of its God, his promise that there is grandeur—if you look hard enough, you’ll find it.

And then. At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, Earth shrugged.

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.”

He was sounding more and more like my father. The way to live was, in every breath, to concede your insignificance, and make your meaning from there.

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are. It’s a hard lot being a human, these psychologists explain. You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.

In reality, down in the water, beneath their costumes of scales exist all kinds of creatures, as varied as those on the mountaintop.

For more than three decades, he has been trying to convince his students that the natural world does not actually arrange itself into the categories we set for it. And he has been dismayed to watch how little the idea has spread outside academia. He worries that he is up against an opponent far too mighty: intuition.

If fish don’t exist, what else don’t we know about our world? What other truths are waiting behind the lines we draw over nature? What other categories are about to cave in?

To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.