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

by Lulu Miller

And then there was his first teaching gig, his pupils a group of unruly boys in a nearby town. For weeks David attempted to maintain some semblance of order by conducting class with a wooden pointer; he’d wave it around, trying to focus their attention, occasionally even whapping the worst of the boys with it. Until, that is, the boys revolted. They descended upon David, grabbed his trusty pointer, and set it on fire.

Agassiz was a Swiss geologist, a charismatic bear of a man with bushy mutton chops, who had earned his fame by being one of the earliest proponents of the ice age theory. Agassiz had only come to this vision of an earth coated in ice after making meticulous observations of fossils and scratch marks in the bedrock. As a result, he believed that the best way to teach science was to scrutinize nature. “Study nature, not books” was his motto, and he was known for locking his students in a closet with dead animals and not allowing them to emerge until they had discovered “all the truths which the objects contained.”

Camus estimates it’s on the mind of a majority of us at any moment. That remedy for pain so enticing that eighteenth-century poet William Cowper termed it the “grand temptation.”

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.

“Natura non facit saltum,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.

Darwin

Ever the disciple of his prophet Louis Agassiz, David examined the organisms he was encountering for moral instruction. He had taken Agassiz’s foggy idea of “degeneration,” mashed it up with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and ran with it. He saw the slimy hagfish as evidence that “bad habits” such as sloth or parasitism could make a species degenerate, devolve, or “change for the worse.” In a scientific paper, David proposed that the sea squirt, a sedentary sac of a filter feeder, had once been a higher fish but had “degraded” into its current form due to a combination of “idleness,” “inactivity and dependence.” He wasn’t sure of the exact mechanisms that would cause such a deterioration, but to David, the sea squirt was a clear warning. A cautionary tale in laziness. A literal sad sack.

Show zack

The precious holotype is housed behind guarded gates inside our national collection—the Smithsonian’s massive annex specimen library some twenty miles outside the capital.

Go

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

In a piece called “Science and Sciosophy,” published in Science in 1924, he hails 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.” And David uses the quote to indict his readers, to warn them that if they’ve ever chosen to shut out hard truths in the name of happiness they are complicit with Bruno’s killers.

I told her about my obsession with David Starr Jordan, the earthquake, the sewing needle. “So it’s sort of about why,” I said. “What drives a person to keep going?” All she said was “Huh” in the moment, and I felt a little deflated, but a longer reply came the next afternoon, via email: and your story—the man who builds something so precious, so ornate… only to see it all crumble… where does he re-locate his will to go on? Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well… if you do (or are forced to) remove all those excesses, you get the Indestructible, and once you acknowledge it, Kafka goes deeper—he doesn’t let you think the Indestructible is optimistic or positive—instead it is the thing that could actually rip us apart and destroy us…

Research

So starting in the 1970s, a wave of researchers began running experiments to see if it was true. And time and time again they found that, indeed, mentally healthy people rated themselves as more attractive than they were, more helpful, more intelligent, more in control of chance events (like rolling dice or picking winning lottery numbers) than they possibly could be. When they looked into their past, they remembered their successes with more ease than their failures. When they looked into their future, they voted themselves as more likely to succeed than their friends and classmates. Those people, on the other hand, with that oh-so-hailed virtue of accurate perception? Ding ding ding, you guessed it: clinically depressed. They struggled in their lives, found it harder to recoup after setbacks, often had more trouble in work and relationships. So a few modifications were made in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A few traits slid from the proverbial unhealthy column to the healthy one. The term “delusions” was neutered to “positive illusions.” And by the late 1980s, largely because of a seminal paper by psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown that reviewed over two hundred studies that had shown a range of benefits of living with a positively warped worldview, it became widely accepted that a dash of self-deception… was good for the bones.

She wanted to figure out what it was that the achievers had. A few years later, she unearthed a trait she named “grit” that seemed to be the magic ingredient. Grit. A catchier word for persistence. Grit. The robotic plunging at “extremely long-term objectives” without “positive feedback.” Grit. The ability to bang one’s head repeatedly against a wall. She’d seen it in West Point cadets and CEOs and people at the top of their game in every profession. Musicians. Athletes. Chefs. Forget talent, creativity, kindness, IQ. Pure grit seemed to be the thing that would get you ahead. And what cognitive glitch helps you achieve grit? Positive illusions. Other studies showed that if you had positive illusions, you were less likely to experience discouragement after setbacks. And while grit is a cocktail of many traits, one of its most important ones is just that: an ability to keep going after setbacks, to keep going in the face of no evidence that what you are striving for will ever work, or, as Duckworth puts it, “maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”

Disability

But it’s not just the social toll. Inside the thick-walled bubble of self-delusion, the pain can slowly accumulate. Wilberta Donovan found that new mothers with a high illusion of control experienced more feelings of helplessness when their babies wouldn’t stop crying than do their depressive counterparts. Richard Robins and Jennifer Beer looked at college students over four years and found that, while students with high positive illusions were happier in the short term (because they thought they did better on tasks than they actually did), over time their ratings of well-being took a nosedive. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment, was how Robins and Beer explained it: “short-term benefits but long-term costs.” In other words, the lie catches up.

That it was people with a grandiose view of themselves who strike out. In other words, Baumeister and his colleague Brad J. Bushman discovered what depressed people had known all along. If you tell a person with low self-esteem “You suck,” they say “You’re right,” and roll back under the covers. It’s the esteem-bloated person, who has enough belief in himself to classify such an insult as untrue, who bothers striking back. “Aggressors often think very highly of themselves,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “as evidenced by nationalistic imperialism, ‘master race’ ideologies, aristocratic dueling, playground bullies, and street gang rhetoric.”

“In plainer terms,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “it is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous but, rather, those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings.… People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.”

According to weather data, the last day of Jane’s life was a stunner. Sunny, highs in the sixties. Jane and her entourage, who had been on the island for about a week, decided to take a carriage up to the Pali overlook for a scenic picnic. They brought with them a picnic basket prepared by the hotel’s kitchen staff containing freshly baked gingerbread, hard-boiled eggs, meat-and-cheese sandwiches, chocolates, and coffee. For a few hours, they sat in the shade, enjoying the ocean view, picking at their snacks, and reading aloud to one another from a sci-fi novel.

I want this. Alert everyone

“He attached so exaggerated an importance to biological inheritance, that he seemed to think almost every quality of human personality could be explained thereby.” Poverty, laziness, the ability to classify birds—all simply a matter of the blood! David Starr Jordan was one of the first to bring Galton’s ideas back to America. As early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fever, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University, informing students that traits like “pauperism” and “degener[acy]” were heritable and thus could be “exterminated just as swamps are drained.”

In his writings, David took all the kinds of people he wanted to rid from the Earth—the paupers and drinkers and “crétins” and “imbeciles” and “idiots” and morally depraved—and he lumped them into one category, the “unfit.”

In the wake of these talks and similar ones given by other early eugenicists, back-alley sterilizations and, occasionally, executions began taking place all over America. In 1915, a doctor in Chicago named Harry Haiselden began leaving disabled babies to die, earning him the nickname “the Black Stork.” There were rumors of a mental hospital in Illinois that was intentionally killing off its patients with tuberculosis-infected milk.

Still, the actual rate of sterilization was low. The policies David helped to put in place required an “unfit” person to first come into contact with the law or the medical, education, or welfare system before a sterilization could take place. Then, in 1916, an American eugenicist named Madison Grant published a book that a German guy named Hitler would later call his “bible.” In the book, The Passing of the Great Race, Grant proposed a policy that, in certain ways, resembled Galton’s sci-fi vision: that all the nation’s “moral perverts, mental defectives and hereditary cripples” be rounded up under the guise of charity and sterilized. American eugenicists thought it was brilliant. When over a decade later Hitler passed Germany’s first mandatory sterilization law, American eugenicist and doctor Joseph DeJarnette whined, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

In 1906, Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker struck down what would have been the first compulsory sterilization law in the world, saying, “To permit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class… which the state has undertaken to protect.”

And then there was the mounting scientific dissent. More and more scholars were calling the science behind eugenics “rot,” pointing out that a person’s environment played a crucial role in many of the traits eugenicists thought could be eradicated by sterilization—poverty, promiscuity, illiteracy, criminality.

And then there was that key point in On the Origin of Species. That crucial point that somehow both David and before him Francis Galton had missed. 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.

Homogeneity is a death sentence

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. It was that ungainly neck that gave the giraffe an edge over its competitors, the seeming deadweight of blubber that allowed the seal to thrive in the advancing cold, the divergent human brain that might hold the key to inventions, discoveries, and revolutions that the majority is unable to fathom. “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.”

It’s a basic philosophical concept sometimes called the “dandelion principle”: in some contexts a dandelion might be considered a weed to be culled; in others, it’s a valuable medicinal herb to be cultivated.

the Eugenics Record Office, a shiny, new pro-eugenics research hub in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO would go on to collect boatloads of data on tens of thousands of Americans. The researchers would then use the information to construct family trees that suggested that complicated phenomena such as poverty, criminality, promiscuity, dishonesty, and a fondness for the ocean (which was given the clinical term “thalassophilia”) were predestined in the blood.

Thalassophilia is in my blood tho

Oh, and as for that international peace prize! It turned out David would spend a great deal of his later years, in the run-up to World War I, traveling the globe to warn diplomats against the dangers of war, facing so much resistance he was once stopped mid-speech by a German general who commanded, “Genug!” (Enough!) And why? Why was he so committed to the unpopular cause of pacifism? Because, David reasoned, war depleted a nation of its best and brightest. The death of his brother, Rufus, had never left him. The highest-quality men went to fight and die, he explained, leaving the “unfit” to reproduce. “[I]f a nation sends forth the best it breeds to destruction,” he said to an audience of hundreds gathered in Philadelphia, “the second best will take their vacant places. The weak, the vicious, the unthrifty will propagate and… have the land to themselves.” In other words, he was a pacifist as a means of accomplishing his eugenicist ends.

Usa military preys on the poor and under educated now

“It’s counterintuitive!” Rick Winterbottom, a self-described “raving cladist,” told me. He knows that more than anyone. 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. That people will never exchange comfort for truth.I

When Trenton Merricks, the UVA philosopher who does not believe in chairs, gave up the fish, he got another arrow in his quiver. “I’m not that shocked,” he told me after I breathlessly informed him of the dissolution of the category. This is exactly what he’s trying to get his students to understand. 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.”

When Anna gave up the fish—well, she hasn’t really. But she asked if it was sort of like the term “unfit.” That word that had been slapped onto her back, and used to throw her behind brick walls, steal her childhood, and cut off her chances of carrying on. I said that, yes, it was very much like that. 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.

Once you name something you tend to stop looking at it - oh my heart...