Why Fish Don't Exist

“When I first heard about David Starr Jordan’s attack on Chaos, I was in my early twenties, starting out as a science reporter. Instantly, I assumed he was a fool. The needle might work against a quake, but what about fire or flood or rust or any of the trillion modes of destruction he hadn’t thought to consider? His innovation with the sewing needle seemed so flimsy, so shortsighted, so magnificently unaware of the forces that ruled him. He seemed to me a lesson in hubris. An Icarus of the fish collection.”

In this quote, Miller lays out one of the core themes of the book: the inescapable influence of chaos on human life. By describing her skepticism of David Starr Jordan’s refusal to accept the inevitability of chaos, she sets herself up as a character in the book as well—as someone seeking a reason for hope and investigating the evidence that can be gleaned from Jordan’s example. Ultimately, Miller’s mention of Icarus foreshadows the pitfalls in Jordan’s character. Overconfident Icarus flew too close to the sun and crashed to earth, while Jordan’s confidence in his own ability to control chaos blinded him to the weaknesses in his own belief system. 

“By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsessive ordering of the natural world was beginning to fall out of fashion. The Age of Discovery had started over four hundred years before, and pretty much wrapped up in 1758, when the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, finished his masterpiece, Systema Naturae, a proposed blueprint for all the interconnections of life.”

Throughout the book, Miller explores how we use names to order our understanding of reality. In this quote, Miller is exploring how the passion for dividing the world into categories started from childhood, for David Starr Jordan. In this obsession, Jordan was somewhat of an iconoclast; as this quote suggests, by Jordan’s lifetime, taxonomy had fallen out of favor, and was no longer the popular scientific discipline it had been. This quote also points to the theme of the importance of persistence: Jordan doggedly pursued taxonomy despite the fact it was not fashionable, and by pursuing his passion, he obtained personal and professional success, and discovered thousands of species previously unknown to science.