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

by Lulu Miller

Chaos will get them. Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.

A smart human accepts this truth. A smart human does not try to fight it.

“I still remember the long period of loneliness and distress after his untimely death,” David writes. “Night after night I would dream that it was not true and that he had returned safe and sound.”

Its location was ideal: an hour from the mainland, easy enough to access, yet far enough to feel free. So was its size: big enough to roam, but small enough to never get lost. And as for the subjects available for study on Penikese? Well, where to begin.

Luckily for us, the famous poet John Greenleaf Whittier was also in attendance that summer and he did not agree with David’s assessment. Whittier would later publish a poem called “The Prayer of Agassiz” recounting that very speech. He starts with a bit of scene setting—“On the isle of Penikese / Ringed about by sapphire seas”—and then gets to it, to Agassiz’s main point, the reason collecting mattered.

You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please.

Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days. About how to have faith without Faith.

When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

“Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to build a great city. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and forever man must rise above his own creations. That which is in man is greater than all that he can do.

It is the will of man that shapes the fates.

“A little lie can go a long way?” “Sure.”

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

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.

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

Welcome to my only footnote in the book! Thanks for joining me here. Your reward is learning about the crazy factoid that there may even be an order of the natural world wired into us. Carol Kaesuk Yoon writes about the incredible medical case of J.B.R., a British patient in the 1980s who accidentally damaged this piece of neurological machinery (Yoon, 12–13) after a case of herpes caused his brain to swell. J.B.R. awoke anew, suddenly unable to properly distinguish between basic categories in the natural world. He couldn’t tell the difference between a cat and a carrot, a toadstool and a toad. It was all… Chaos. But oddly, the nonliving world was completely intact. He understood the difference between a car and a bus, a table and a chair, no problem. It was only the living world that was in shambles. What his case and others (just google “category-specific semantic deficits” to find them) suggest is that there may be a kind of order-creating mechanism inside of us—that we come into the world predisposed to acquire a very specific set of beliefs about how to sort nature. Who belongs together, who belongs apart, who belongs on top. Other studies have shown how early we seem to obey these intuitive rules: at four months old we begin differentiating between cats and dogs, for example. The fact that this intuitive order may be a part of our wiring does not mean it is truth. It means it is useful. It means that it has served our species well over the generations, helped us to s...