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

by Lulu Miller

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...