Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages)

By Ann Fabian

Escapist reading leaving you feeling trapped? Dystopian novels landing too close to home? Romance making you grumpy? Thrillers falling flat? Mysteries unrewarding? Let me recommend a book about David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and the leading ichthyologist of his generation.

University? Fish? Some California pedant? Not ready yet to rush out to your local bookstore?

Can I tempt you with the idea that Jordan may have had a hand in the murder of Jane Stanford, widow of university founder, Leland Stanford? Or with a hint that a campus statue toppled by the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 will make you laugh? Or with a promise that you’ll understand why (maybe) fish don’t exist.

Jordan is the central figure in Lulu Miller’s small marvel of a book, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life (illustrated with playful drawings by Kate Samworth). Jordan is hardly a household name, but, trust me, the book has payoffs aplenty and you’ll get a glimpse of ideas from philosophy, psychology, and contemporary taxonomy.

Those of you who’ve heard Miller’s stories on “RadioLab” or “This American Life” know her as a gifted reporter with an eye for quirky twists in the history of science. She’s also a master of the breezy prose vernacular of the American podcast where ordinary language is plenty good enough to set out life’s biggest questions.

Miller has more room to play on the pages of her book, where she puts that radio-prose style to good use, leading readers along with amiable chatter but then pulling up short at the edge of something sad, shocking, brutal, horrifying, profound or just uncomfortably personal.

Why Fish Don’t Exist is full of those jittery surprises. Its running theme is the heartbreaking human effort to keep chaos at bay. “My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is growing, it can never be diminished, no matter what we do,” Miller tells us at the start.

That thought brought Miller to David Starr Jordan, a man who enlisted early in a fight against Chaos. Jordan was born in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy, he made maps, collected plants and studied the stars. He graduated from Cornell, taught for a time in Indiana, and catalogued thousands of fish species. In 1891, he landed at Stanford. Jordan’s successful life was peppered by setbacks that would have discouraged most mortals. Disease took a brother, a wife, a child; an accident killed a collaborator; scandal brushed his presidential tenure; fire destroyed one fish collection, the earthquake scrambled another. Setbacks did not set Jordan back.

Wondering what kept Jordan from the crippling doubts that plague most of us, Miller drags this scholar of fish (this chesty mustachioed university president) into our present. How did Jordan develop what he called his “shield of optimism”? It doesn’t seem to have been a religious faith, since he worked in a largely secular scientific world. Was it character? Personality? Experience?

Looking for answers, Miller visits those psychologists, philosophers and contemporary taxonomists. She travels. She puzzles her questions through Jordan’s two-volume autobiography and chases ideas down in his articles and lecture notes. Jordan was as wordy as he was confident. And though she began hoping Jordan’s abounding self-confidence would show her a way out of self-doubt, that’s not where the story goes. With the help of two women in Virginia, Miller comes to discover an ugly side to Jordan’s buoyant self-assurance.

Although he studied with Louis Agassiz, the Harvard professor who held fast to the idea that species were fixed, immutable and set down once and for all by divine design, Jordan came of age in a scientific world remade by Charles Darwin. The natural world was not fixed and unchanging, and its evolution was governed by chance, not by the hand of God.

Miller holds to the beauty and generosity in Darwin’s vision of the world. But there’s a dark side to Jordan’s understanding of Darwin. Even as he embraced the idea of evolving species, he clung to an old belief that even a changing world was still governed by hierarchy. Some creatures were better than others; some humans better than others.

These ideas—half Darwin, half hierarchy—led Jordan and his peers into the sorry embrace of eugenics and, in their misplaced confidence that they knew best what a human future should be, into the cruel practice of eugenic sterilization.

That's the dark side to Miller’s story of David Starr Jordan, the man revered at Stanford, but pretty much forgotten everywhere else. Those dark conclusions don’t really capture the feel of the book’s hungry curiosity. Nor does what I’ve written explain how she recruits disappearing “fish” into a carefully targeted act of revenge against Jordan and his over-confident white man friends.

I guess you’ll have to read the book.

Ann Fabian is writing a book about a herpetologist who spent a miserable year working for Jordan.