Why Fish Don’t Exist: Fishy Scientist suspected of a poisonous murder
WHY FISH DON’T EXIST by Lulu Miller (One £16.99, 240pp)
Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a devastating earthquake. In less than a minute, buildings all over the city collapsed.
More than 3,000 people were killed. One man described the feeling of having his body tossed about ‘as a rat might be shaken by a dog’. His name was David Starr Jordan and he is at the heart of Lulu Miller’s quirky, fascinating book.
Jordan survived the earthquake but he did lose his life’s work. He was a scientist – an ichthyologist, an expert on fish.
The tremors brought his collection of thousands of fish species, all carefully tagged and named in their glass jars, crashing to the floor. Amid the shattered glass and mutilated fish, order had been reduced to chaos.
After reading about Jordan, Miller became obsessed with him. What she most admired was his resilience in the face of catastrophe.
She was going through a crisis of confidence in her own life. A relationship had just ended. She was struggling to find meaning in the world. Jordan’s determination to rebuild his life and his collection seemed an inspiration.
Reading more about him, she found much that was admirable. A farmboy who became the president of Stanford University, Jordan first discovered his vocation on what was advertised as a ‘Course of Instruction in Natural History to be Delivered by the Seaside’.
This was where ‘I made my first acquaintance with fishes of the sea,’ he wrote.
He set himself the task of ‘discovering every freshwater fish in North America’. In 1880, he was sent to catalogue the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.
Further expeditions around the world followed. He and his team were, as Miller puts it, ‘discovering fish faster than they could name them’. Ugly fish were named after enemies, pretty ones after friends.
High Flyer: David Starr Flyer went from a farmboy to President of Stanford University
At one point, Jordan estimated that of the 12,000 to 13,000 species of fish known in his day, he and his colleagues had discovered nearly a fifth of them. His own name was attached to at least 100 species. Jordan’s wrasse. Jordan’s grouper. Jordan’s snapper.
Yet Miller soon discovered a dark side to her idol. In 1905, Jane Stanford, widow of Stanford University’s founder, and no fan of Jordan, died in mysterious circumstances, almost certainly poisoned.
It seems improbable that he was responsible for her death but he certainly did everything he could to muddy the waters for any investigation and ensure that it wasn’t declared a murder.
Worse still, he became one of America’s leading advocates of the pseudoscience of eugenics and the sterilisation of those he considered unfit to breed. Eugenics was practised in the US for decades. One of Miller’s most moving passages describes her visit to an old woman named Anna in Lynchburg, Virginia, who was sterilised against her will as recently as 1967.
Why does the book have such as eye-catching title? Jordan was a taxonomist – a scientist dedicated to bringing order to the rich chaos of the natural world.
Nonexistent: new scientific thinking suggests that ‘fish’ do not exist
Some of today’s taxonomists, known as ‘cladists’, no longer see the word ‘fish’ as describing a scientifically meaningful category of creature. Dissect a cow, a salmon and a lungfish and you find that, defying common sense, there are ways in which the lungfish is more closely related to the cow than the salmon.
‘Do fish exist?’ Miller asks one taxonomist.
‘Probably not,’ he replies. Could David Jordan have coped with this revelation? For a man who rebuilt his life after the disaster of the earthquake, the answer is: ‘Probably, yes.’