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

by Lulu Miller

For years he worked, for decades, so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover a full fifth of fish known to man in his day.

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.

In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David Starr Jordan—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto. David was intrigued by the offer, the generous salary, the glorious weather, the promise of reuniting with those oily treasures of the Pacific Ocean. His only hesitation was the Stanfords themselves. Leland Stanford was a Republican senator who was widely considered a robber baron. His wife, Jane, had little formal education and was fond of visiting mediums to try to reach their deceased son. David worried that if he accepted, he would feel like a kept man, a pawn, controlled by the whims of two people whom he considered his moral and intellectual inferiors. But… that weather… that salary. In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

But David Starr Jordan, good Puritan, was not a fan of breaking the law, so he began advocating for the legalization of eugenic sterilization. In 1907, a few of his friends from Bloomington successfully legalized forced eugenic sterilization in Indiana—the first such law not just in the country but in the world. Two years later, David helped get it passed in California. His commitment to the cause apparent, he was asked to chair the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association. He eagerly accepted.

Like, for example, as much as a bat might look like a winged rodent, it’s actually more closely related to camels. Or that whales are actually ungulates (the family to which deer belong)!