It will just happen to you. If you have devoted almost your entire career, nay, your entire life, to collecting fish – year after year on an expedition, day and night in the lab – and then your entire collection is destroyed in one fell swoop. In one quake, to be exact.
For it was the world-famous, destructive earthquake of April 18, 1906 in San Francisco that destroyed the life’s work of ichthyologist David Starr Jordan. Countless fish, discovered and described by him, kept in glass jars, lay between the shards on the floor after that night. The name tags were so mixed up that only a fraction of the fish could be re-named. In those species, Jordan patiently sewed the tag through the lip so that they could still be identified in the next quake.
David Starr Jordan, writes American science journalist Lulu Miller in her book Why fish don’t exist (translated by Lidwien Biekmann) was at first sight a born optimist, with the motto ‘I never worry about a setback once it’s over’. A researcher who strove to order nature – starting with the fish – in order to get a grip on life itself.
Grip was something Miller herself desperately craved when she first got on the trail of Jordan years ago. Her relationship was in shambles, and she searched frantically for someone to show her how to emerge stronger from that crisis. An optimistic ichthyologist seemed the right person to bring order to the chaos.
With an emphasis on look. Because the deeper Miller delved into Jordan’s life, even obsessively, the more she discovered his dark side as well.
Figurines
Why fish don’t exist begins as a light-hearted biography, as a science-historical treatise with a personal aside now and then. But slowly the true story turns out to take on thriller-like features.
For while many scientists, from Aristotle to David Starr Jordan, throughout the ages have believed “that there is a moral code hidden in nature—a hierarchy, a ladder, or ‘gradation’ of perfection,” such an idea can be narrowing. Miller: “The rungs of the ladder that we think we see are our own figments of the imagination; they arise from ‘conceit’ rather than from reality.” And there is a risk “that once you put a label on something, you don’t really look at it anymore.”
The consequences that had for Jordan, and especially for those around him, become increasingly clear throughout the story. Miller lifts a small corner of the veil every time, which makes you want to keep reading – if only to understand that enigmatic title. In a smooth, accessible style and with humor, she not only tells the life story of Jordan, she also sheds new light on the history of ichthyology and that of taxonomy.