Why Fish Don't Exist

 P14

Meticulously rendered sketches of wildflowers and ferns and ivies and brambles and any scraps of nature, it seemed, he could tear away from the world. The drawings are not artful; they are labored, covered in pencil smudges, ink stains, eraser marks, and little tears from overly vigorous coloring in. But in the crudeness you can see it - his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort he was exerting to pin down the forms of the things unknown to him. Beneath each drawing there is, finally, a scientific name. The ink runs suddenly smoother, the letters looping with a bit of command. 

Psychologists have studied this, by the way, the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish. In Collection: An Unruly Passion, psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of "deprivation or loss or vulnerability," with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of "fantasized omnipotence." Francisca Lopez- Torrecillas, who has been studding collectors for years at the University of Granada, noted a similar phenomenon, that people experiencing stress or anxiety would turn to collecting to soothe their pain. "When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency," she writers, "compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better." The only danger, Muensterberger warns, is that - as with any compulsion - there seems to be a line where the habit can switch from "exhilarating" to "ruinous".

P 20

No, if you were satisfied with the beliefs of the day, Agassiz worried, it kept you stunted, stymied, sick. The way out, the way to enlightenment, was to keep looking, closer, longer, at the pebbles and petals and pelts of this world. 

p 34

I have no idea what my face would have looked like then. Ashen? It was as if a big feather comforter had just been ripped off the world. 

Chaos, he informed me, was our only ruler.  This massive swirl of dumb forces was what made us, accidentally, and would destroy us, imminently. It cared nothing for us, not our dreams, our intentions, our most virtuous of actions. "Never forget," he said, pointing to the pine-needle soil beneath the deck," as special as you might feel, you are no different than an ant. A bit bigger, maybe, but no more significant" - he paused, consulting the map of hierarchies that existed in his head - "except, do I see you aerating the soil? Do I see you feeding on timber to accelerate the process of decomposition?"

P38

I remember thinking that there didn't seem to be anywhere good to get to. That the outside world offered only vicious hallways, empty horizons. The inside world, only slamming doors. I see nothing gleaming, I wrote in my journal on April 8, 1999. A Sunday. I was newly sixteen. After school the nex day, I drove to Walgreens. I made my way to the aisle full of sleeping pills. 

P 69

Unfortunately for David, however, Chaos was not the only adversary he had to worry about. As David ticked into his late forties, as his mustache sprouted its first strands of white, Jane Standord, in her long black dress, continued to nag at David, to question his every move, to yank him away from his fish. Her concerns about his leadership - her charges of nepotism, of extravagant spending - grew to the point where she appointed a spy to keep tabs on him. 

P 88

He was sounding more and more like my father. The way to live was, in every breath, to concede your insignificance, and make your meaning from there. Everywhere I looked, I saw it. Stern warnings against hubris, against magical thinking. In his syllabus for a course on evolution, for example, he sneaks in a whole section on the cosmic impotence of man. "Nature no respecter of person," he writer. 

How did he get himself up and out the door on the worst of days, when everything seemed lost, crumbled, hopeless?

A small black book called  The philosophy of Despair. In it, David confesses that the trouble with the scientific worldview was that when you pointed it at the meaning of life, it showed you one thing. Futility: "The fires we kindle die away in coals; castles we build vanish before our eyes. The river sinks in the sands of the desert.... Whichever way we turn we may describe the course of life in metaphors of discouragement. " 

"He claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. ?Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering, " he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, "from the exercise of functions; from self-activity." Don't overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The "luscious" taste of a peach, the "lavish" color of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience "the stern joy which warriors feel." Toward the end of the boo, he quotes Thoreau - "There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world - in any world" - and then he sends his readers off with a rousing chant of carpe diem. "Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today."

The ultimate conclusion of The Philosophy of Despair is that despair is a choice. While he thinks it's a natural phase of adolescence, he mocks those who can't shake it. He calls them lazy, whiny posers who are putting on the "fad of the drooping spirit" to imitate the "sad kings" of literature. 

P 120

I was lost in my thoughts, thinking about my weird attachment to David Starr Jordan, my hope that he was the person who could lead me out of the mess I had made of my life. There was so much I admired about him. His sarcasm. His devotion to the "hidden and insignificant" flowers. His absurd walrus mustache, which reminded me of my dad's clownish push broom. his steel backbone, that gritty resolve that made him refuse to crumple in the face of whatever misfortune came his way. Is this what happens if you employ his sunny disposition? You become so callous, so impervious to obstacle, that you can stomp out a woman's life, or at the very least be willing to cover up the truth of her death?

P 143 THE LADDER

David Starr Jordan remained an ardent eugenicist until his dying day. There's no evidence of any last-moment realization or remorse. Not about the thoughts of people who were brandished with scars and shame thanks to his efforts. Not about the individuals he trampled as he fought to maintain his power - Jane Standford, the doctors he slandered, the spy he fired, the librarian he accused of sexual perversity.

It was chilling. His brutality. His remorselessness. The sheer depth of his descent, the breadth of his rampage. i felt sick. I had been fashioning myself after a villain, after all. A man so sure of himself and his ideas that he was capable of ignoring reason, of ignoring morality, of ignoring the clamor of thousands of people begging him to see the error of his ways - I am a humanbeen as well as you. 

Looking at the full spread of David's emotional anatomy, the most obvious culprit seems to be that thick "shield of optimism" he was so proud to possess. He had "a terrifying capacity for convincing himself that what he wanted was right," writes scholar Luther Spoehr, who was struck by how David's certainty in himself, his self-delusion and hardheadedness, only seemed to intensify over the years. "His ability to crush those in his path multiplied even as he became convinced that his path was the one of righteousness which led to progress." As much as David had railed publicly against self-delusion, privately he seemed to rely on it, especially in times of trial. It is the will of man that shapes the fates. Perhaps that group of psychologist had been right, the ones who warned that positive illusions can ferment into a vicious thing if left unchecked, capable of striking out against anything that stands in our way. 

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 been memoirs 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. We don't have the biggest brain or the best memory. we're not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We're no the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don't have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren't even the newest creation on the block. 

Whey would he protect it, this arbitrary belief about how plants and creatures should be arranged? When challenged, why would he only double down and use it to justify such violent measures?

Perhaps because his belief gave him something more important than truth. 

P 147

Not just that first spark of purpose as a young man on Penikese, not just a career and a cause and a wife and cushy life. But something even more profound. A way of turning that roiling morass, of the sea, of the stars, of his dizzying life, into clear, shining order. 

To let go, at any point - from his first read of Darwin to his last push for eugenics - would have been to invite a return to vertigo. he would have been transported back to being that lost little boy, shaking before a world that had just taken his brother. A terrified child, powerless before the world, wih no way of understanding or controlling. To let go of that hierarchy would be to release a tornado of life, beetles and hawks and bacteria and sharks, swirling high into the air, all around him, above him. 

it would haven too disorienting.

It would have been Chaos.

It would have been --

-- the very same vision of the world I myself had been fighting so hard not to look at ever since I was a little girl. The sense of falling off the edge of the world, plummeting alongside ants and stars, with no purpose or point. Of glimpsing the glaring, relentless truth so clear from inside the swirl of Chaos. You don't matter. 

That's what the ladder offered David. An antidote. A foothold. The lovely, warm feeling of significance. 

In that light, I could understand why he clung to it so tightly, this vision of a natural order. Why he protected it so ferociously - against morality, against reason, against truth. Even as I despised him for it, on some level I craved the very same thing. 

P 158 DANDELIONS

The nation's mercy of letting you finish out your years instead of killing you, as they would have wished, on the spot.

I t thought about how he likely would have deemed me unfit, too. My sadness repugnant to him, a sign of moral failure. A sulfur-breathed waste of a life.

I wanted to have some amazing retort. Some grandstand way of telling him how wrong he was. That we matter, we matter. But as soon as I'd feel my first lifting, my brain would tug it back. Because of course, we don't. We don't matter. This is the cold truth of the universe. We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos. To ignore this truth is, oddly enough, to behave exactly like David Starr Jordan, whose ridiculous belief in his own superiority allowed him to perpetrate such unthinkable violence. no, to be clear-eyed and Good was to concede with every breath, with every step, our insignificance. To say otherwise was to sin, to lie, to march oneself off toward delusion, madness, or worse. 

oh, it was a tangle.

An ouroboros eating its tail.

A blue-tailed skink climbing for redemption only to get smacked down by the truth of the eagle on high.

I felt struck.

P 162

Or that - hold on to your seat - you matter, Reader.

It wasn't a lie to say so, but a more accurate way of seeing nature. 

It was the dandelion principle!

To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to there that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it's a medicine - a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it's a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it's sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas. 

And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one's darkest year. 

This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature's organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life." The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend. 

As I kept driving, I pictured all the dandelions in the whole wide world nodding their heads in unison at me finally getting it, waving beyond my wheels, shaking their yellow pom-poms, cheering me on. At long last, I had found it, a retort to my father. We matter, we matter. In tangible, concrete ways human beings matter to this planet, to society, to one another. It was not a lie to say no. not a sappy cop-out or a sin. it was Darwin's creed! It was, conversely, a lie to say only that we didn't matter and keep it at that. That was too gloomy. Too rigid. Too shortsighted. Dirtiest word of all: unscientific. 

But there was still the problem of what I was driving toward, what we all were driving toward, in our cars with our headlights and our hope. That same empty horizon. I was still sure that our ruler was uncaring and cold, that waiting around the corner for each of us was precisely nothing. No promises. No refuge. No gleaming. no matter what we did or how much we mattered to one another. 

P 170 DEUS EX MACHINA

David Starr Jordan was allowed to emerge unscathed, unpunished for his sins, because this is the world in which we live. An uncaring world with no sense of cosmic justice encoded anywhere in its itchy, meaningless fabric. 

Because our world, our bottomlessly chaotic world, had one more trick up here sleeve. One last way of wrecking David's order, of stealing away that thing most precious to him.

Did you see it there? Flashing across the spectacles of the taxonomists, refracting off their scalpels, glimmering across the cover of this very book - insidious way that Chaos finally demolished his fish collection once and for all?

For some, the letting go of the stars was horrifying. It made them feel too small, too pointless, too out of control /they would not believe it. They shot the messengers. When Copernicus gave up the stars, he was condemned as a heretic. When Giordaono Bruno gave up the stars, he was burned at the stake. When Galileo gave up the stars, he was placed under house arrest.

For others, it inspired ambition, invention, engineering. Generations of humans would grow up hell-bent on figuring out how to launch ships to the other side of intuition. Their wildest dreams are why we now lay hands upon the moon.

For me, when I gave up the stars, as a child on the deck that morning with my dad, I got a breeze - a sense of spinning through the cosmos pointlessly, which on bad days could leave me with a near-fatal chill.

When my father gave up the stars, he got the freedom to invent his own morality, to flout any rules he deemed pointless - return addresses, sleeves, not eating your lab mice. 

I'm sure giving up the stars has a different effect on a priest. A nomad. A baker. A candlestick maker. 

So, too, with the fish.

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."

Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you ten to stop looking at it. 

...that swimming in that water are creatures with far more cognitive complexity than we typically think. That "fish," in a certain sense, is a derogatory term. A word we use to hid that complexity, to keep ourselves comfortable, to feel further away from them than we actually are. 

When Carol Kaesuk Yoon gave up the fish, she developed a sort of rage at the scientific community she had revered her whole life. A worry that by stealing away human intuition, you leave the general public caring even less about the environment  - which so desperately needs our affection. Despite a book so beautifully articulating the death of the fish, apart of her yearns for a return to simple language. 

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. Scientist, de Waal pointed out, can be some of the worst offenders - employing technical language to distance that other animals from us. 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 an animal can beat us at a cognitive task  like how certain bird species can remember the precise locations of thousands of seeds - they write it off as instinct, not intelligence. This and so many more tricks of language are what de Waal has termed "linguist castration." They way we use our tongues to disempower animals, the way we invent words to maintain our spot at the top. 

When I asked my dad if he cares that in using it he is imprisoning himself in a limited way of experiencing the world, he groans and says, "Eh. I'm too old to be freed of anything I haven't already been freed from."

My oldest sister had no problem letting go of the fish. "Because it's a fact of life. Humans get things wrong." She said people have been wrong about her, time and time again, for her whole life. She's been misdiagnosed by doctors, misunderstood by classmates, by neighbors, by our parents, by me. "Growing up," she told me, "is learning to stop believing people's words about you."

It is different for everyone.

the gridless place where fish don't exit and nature is more boundless and bountiful than anything we can imagine. 

"There is another world, but it is in this one," says a quote attributed to W.B. Yeats that I kept tacked to my wall for years. That was the world I wanted to see. I tried finding it in interviews with scientists, in documentaries about nature, in whisky. Nothing. 

When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the lfip side of the death. Growth, of rot. 

The best way of ensuring that you don't miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness the 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. 

I am not saying I'm always so good at looking at the world in this way. I cling to my certainty - teddy bear that it is  - and my grudges stay intact; my fear stays charged, the earth flat. But then I read a news article about, say, a new organ discovered in the human body called the "interstitium." There all along but somehow missed by millennia of humans. And the world cracks open a bit. I am reminded to do as Darwin did: to wonder about the reality waiting behind our assumptions. Perhaps that unsightly bacteria is producing the oxygen you need to breathe. Perhaps that heartbreak will prove to be a gift, the hard edge off which you reluctantly bounce to find a better match. Perhaps even your dreams need examining. Perhaps even you hope ... needs some doubt. 

Scientists have discovered, it's true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals. 

When I give up the fish, I get a skeleton key. A fish-shaped skeleton key that pops the grid of rules off this world and lets you step through to wilder place. The other world within this one. The gridless place out the window where fish don't exist and diamonds rain from the sky and each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.

To turn the key all you have to do... is stay wary of words. If fish don't exist, what else do we have wrong? Slow dawning for me, a scientist's daughter, but when I give up the fish, I realize that science itself is flawed. Not the beacon toward truth I had always thought it was, but a blunt tool that can wreak a lot of havoc along the way. Consider the word "order" itself. it come from the Latin ordinem, to describe a row of threads sitting neatly in a loom. In time, it was extended as a metaphor to describe the way that people sit neatly under the rule of a king, general, or president. It was only applied to nature in the 1700s under the assumption - a human fabrication, a superimposition, a guess - that there is an orderly set of ranks to find there. I have come to believe that it is our life's work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life's work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle. 

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Listening to podcast "Invisibilia" is a great joy for me and I look forward to it every week. I wait for a new season just like a kid waits for Christmas gift. Lulu's voice is so pleasant and down to earth that I immerse myself into the stories she's told. Then I heard the interview with her about this book in Radio Lab and marked "to read" at Goodread.com right after. 

I love this book very much!!! It is very readable yet thought-provoking. It blends memoir, biography and personal essay together, just like a pan of wonderful paella. You are already content looking at it. Tasting it will bring pure joy. I enjoy reading the book so much and much more towards the end - I want to continue to read it till the end, but I want to save the last chapter for a couple more days, so that I can tell myself that I still have something nice to go for. I cannot wait to re-read this book. I borrowed a copy from library to read, and throughout half of the book, I am sure that I will get a copy, at least for myself, maybe more, for friends.