Stanford University’s first president, ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, is the complex main character of a new book, "Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life," by Lulu Miller. The book is a wondrous mash-up of biography, memoir, history and even murder mystery. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with Miller, who is co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia and contributor to Radiolab, about Jordan, beginning with a tale from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Shannon Henry Kleiber: Yes, even just the title, "Why Fish Don't Exist," we think, "OK, fish, I know what a fish is," but what does the title mean? Lulu Miller: Well, I have a question for you. After reading it, do you think fish exist? Answer honestly. SHK: So I think fish exist in a way that might not be the way we thought they did. LM: Yeah. I like that. To me, it is an example that just intersected with David's story in a really cool way, because he was a fish collector and ichthyologist, a person who studied the supposedly existent creature of fish. There has been a profound revolution in scientific circles of people who think about how to classify animals that pretty convincingly calls into question the existence of fish as a kind of creature. So it challenges the category of fish. Maybe that just sounds like a fussy, semantic distinction and you wouldn’t care if your day job isn’t a taxonomist. But for me, when you really think about what that means and if you can do this mental scrunching required to let the category go, then some pretty profound things open up. SHK: When did you first hear of the story that would become your book? LM: [A museum tour guide] just kind of offhandedly told the story. He pulled a hammerhead shark out of the tank where it was being stored. And there was a label tied to its eye tube, sewn through the skin. The label had the species name. And he told us the story about how the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed a whole lot of the fish collection and that the curator in charge of things afterwards invented this technique of tying labels directly to the specimen. And it was a small thing, but I just remember standing there and thinking [it's] so human that an earthquake would wreck your order and scatter the names everywhere. And your response would be, "Well, I'm gonna invent a way to get back at you, chaos!" And in that moment, it just struck me as the silliest thing to believe that you could outsmart chaos itself. https://www.wpr.org/we-call-them-fish-evolution-says-theyre-something-else
Stanford University’s first president, ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, is the complex main character of a new book, "Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life," by Lulu Miller. The book is a wondrous mash-up of biography, memoir, history and even murder mystery. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with Miller, who is co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia and contributor to Radiolab, about Jordan, beginning with a tale from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Shannon Henry Kleiber: Yes, even just the title, "Why Fish Don't Exist," we think, "OK, fish, I know what a fish is," but what does the title mean?
Lulu Miller: Well, I have a question for you. After reading it, do you think fish exist? Answer honestly.
SHK: So I think fish exist in a way that might not be the way we thought they did.
LM: Yeah. I like that. To me, it is an example that just intersected with David's story in a really cool way, because he was a fish collector and ichthyologist, a person who studied the supposedly existent creature of fish. There has been a profound revolution in scientific circles of people who think about how to classify animals that pretty convincingly calls into question the existence of fish as a kind of creature. So it challenges the category of fish.
Maybe that just sounds like a fussy, semantic distinction and you wouldn’t care if your day job isn’t a taxonomist. But for me, when you really think about what that means and if you can do this mental scrunching required to let the category go, then some pretty profound things open up.
SHK: When did you first hear of the story that would become your book?
LM: [A museum tour guide] just kind of offhandedly told the story. He pulled a hammerhead shark out of the tank where it was being stored. And there was a label tied to its eye tube, sewn through the skin. The label had the species name. And he told us the story about how the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed a whole lot of the fish collection and that the curator in charge of things afterwards invented this technique of tying labels directly to the specimen. And it was a small thing, but I just remember standing there and thinking [it's] so human that an earthquake would wreck your order and scatter the names everywhere. And your response would be, "Well, I'm gonna invent a way to get back at you, chaos!" And in that moment, it just struck me as the silliest thing to believe that you could outsmart chaos itself.
https://www.wpr.org/we-call-them-fish-evolution-says-theyre-something-else
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