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

by Lulu Miller

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.

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.

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.”

I can’t believe I made it through my entire education without ever learning about our country’s leading role in the eugenics movement. But eugenics seemed as roaring a part of American culture as flappers and the Model T. This was not a fringe movement; it crossed party lines; the first five presidents of the twentieth century hailed its promise; eugenics courses were taught at prestigious universities all across the country, from Harvard to Stanford to Yale to UC Berkeley to Princeton and back again. There were eugenics magazines. Eugenics cosmetics. Even eugenics competitions. Often held at state fairs, under festive white tents. Contests would be held for the fittest families and best babies—measured and weighed like pumpkins. Blue ribbons for the fairest skin, the roundest head, the most symmetrical features.

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.

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.

While most legal scholars will tell you that technically the law is in a state of limbo because every state has since repealed its eugenic sterilization law, the reality is that nearly half of the states still allow for involuntary sterilization of people deemed unfit, only now they use words like “mentally incompetent” or “mentally deficient.”

But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top.

The very mind-set we define our national identity in opposition to—the evil that we tell our schoolchildren started with the Nazis, the others, the bad guys—we were the first in the world to make it national policy.

Slowly, it came into focus. This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these miniscule interactions—a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord—they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.

She spoke about how hard it must have been for people in his day to look up at the stars and fathom that the stars were not the ones moving. But still, it mattered, to talk about it, to think about it, to do the mental scrunching that allowed oneself to slowly let go of the idea of the stars as a celestial ceiling that rotated over one’s head each night. Because, as she said: “When you give up the stars you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?”

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.”

The famous primatologist Frans de Waal, of Emory University, says this is something humans do all the time—downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder. Scientists, de Waal points out, can be some of the worst offenders—employing technical language to distance ourselves from the rest of the animals. They call “kissing” in chimps “mouth-to-mouth contact”; they call “friends” between primates “favorite affiliation partners”; they interpret evidence showing that crows and chimps can make tools as being somehow qualitatively different from the kind of toolmaking said to define humanity.

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? Could clouds be animate? Who knows. On Neptune, it rains diamonds; it really does. Scientists figured that out just a few years ago. The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be. Perhaps there will be a mother waiting inside a person deemed unfit. Perhaps there will be medicine inside a weed. Salvation inside the kind of person you had discounted.

The best way of ensuring that you don’t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt. Is this storm a bummer? Maybe it’s a chance to get the streets to yourself, to be licked by raindrops, to reset. Is this party as boring as I assume it will be? Maybe there will be a friend waiting, with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dance floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame to belonging.