We call them fish. Evolution says they’re something else.

Stanford University’s first president, fish scientist 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 great mix of biography, diary, history, and even a murder mystery. “To the Best of Our Knowledge” producer Shannon Henry Clipper spoke with Miller, co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia and contributor to Radiolab, about Jordan, starting with a story from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

This text has been edited for clarity and length.

Shannon Henry Clipper: Yeah, even just the title, “Why isn’t there fish,” we think, “Well, 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 were.

LM: Yeah. I love that. For me, this is an example that interrupts David’s story in a really cool way, because he was a collector of fish and an ichthyologist, someone who studied the fish creature that was supposed to exist. There has been a profound revolution in the scientific circles of people thinking about how to classify animals that convincingly calls into question the existence of fish as a type of creature. So it challenges the fish category.

It might just seem like an elusive semantic distinction and you wouldn’t care if your day-to-day job isn’t a taxonomist. But for me, when you really think about what that means and if you can do the mental scrutiny required to let the class go, some deeper things open up.

Shaq: When did you first hear about the story that will become your book?

LM: [A museum tour guide] Just kind of offhand. Pull the hammerhead shark out of the tank where it was stored. There was a sticker attached to his eye tube, stitched through the skin. The poster was the name of the species. And it tells the story of how the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed a large group of fish and that the co-ordinator in charge of things then invented this technique to attach labels directly to the sample. It was such a small thing, but I just remember standing there and thinking [it’s] Preach that an earthquake will destroy your system and disperse names everywhere. And your response would be, “Well, I’m gonna invent a way to respond to you, mess!” And at that moment, it struck me as the most ridiculous thing to believe that you could conquer the mess itself.

Chuck: Awesome. In that earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, 3,000 people were killed. It was 7.9 on the Richter scale. What did he win and lose that day to David Starr Jordan?

LM: The Really Exciting Way to Ask It: What’s Won and Lost? Decades of work and neat arrangement are lost. And there may also be species lost to science because so few have yet to be identified. But I think what was gained was shortly thereafter, he was so desperate to continue working and resisting the chaos that continued to invade his life, that he invented this new technique of sewing a sample label directly to the creature itself, literally using a needle to attach the scientific name, to attach human knowledge to the sample . And so I think in a weird way, that any time this guy suffers tragedy or devastation, there is always a moment of innovation.

Sheikh Khaled: So, I stuck an idea of ​​hope and inspiration on Jordan, and then got to know it better, as people do when you search. And you are a biographer, reporter, and detective really, in many ways, into this story. Did it bring you that idea of ​​hope, or did it teach you something different?

LM: It’s too complicated. He did that in certain ways. He showed me a completely different way of responding to the feeling that your chances as a human are doomed to failure. He has shown me that blind confidence can really deliver results for you.

I think I got into it with the belief that arrogance – as the Greeks commanded me, as my father instructed me to grow it up – was always dangerous and would ultimately lead to humiliation. And I think it shows real potential, through thick and thin, that arrogance can pay you tangible benefits.

But it also turns out there is a deep set of things to worry about. And what I found is that there were some very strong adversities there.

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And so I think of him as definitely someone who changed how I see how I live – not in one way or the other, but in multiple ways. It is full of lessons.

SHK: I can totally picture you in those manuscript rooms and read these books that you find, like “The Philosophy of Despair,” the black book that describes it well, and all these different documents and letters and thinking, “Oh, I get it. I see this.” And then, there’s a discovery. In some ways, it is beautiful. Then there is another discovery and you are disappointed. And I felt bad for you.

Locke: Well that’s what made it fun, because it’s history; This man died. But it was vibrant. It was such a muscular snake that kept moving in my hand. And it is full of magic.

In certain respects his study actually looked very similar to making a radio piece, where you have a lot of tape and then you lower it into that gem where someone is funny, emotional, or dark. It’s full spectrum – it’s charming, it’s hilarious, it’s bold. True darkness.

Chuck: He’s an incredible personality. He is a hero and a villain. All in one.

Lame: Yes, exactly.

Chuck: What’s the most surprising thing for you?

Locke: I think for me, it’s about his life becoming intertwined with the eugenics movement. Delving into this, I had no idea what our country’s role in the eugenics movement was – I remember those early days of researching it and getting to know how we were a major player in the eugenics movement, [something that] It will eventually come to define our national identity in return.

SHK: This story you’re writing about – the historical part – is very messy, unexpected, surprising and not easy to relate. And then you get into your personal story, which is also, like many of us, chaotic and not easily explained. And it matches in some way.

LM: Yes, it is. I’ve always had a like-shaped hole in my heart, I grew up with a very atheist father. Then my parents were teachers. Mystery really reigned in our house – nothing meant anything. Or if it means something, it may mean many things. There was no moral instruction. And I think I’ve always been craving more.

I think a lot of people grow up with moral guidance and then want more ambiguity. But I’m one of those strangers who actually want more dogma. I don’t know why it turned out this way, but I do. And that’s part of what has always drawn me to storytelling.

Since I tried slowly, and clumsily, to become a better reporter and learned the art of reporting, I realize that story can actually be very dangerous to convey a sense of story, which is clearly ethical. I’ve tried to ignore my cravings for moral clarity and black and white and actually study both.

SHK: The way you talk about things, these different stories and characters, is all about curiosity and you go in these different directions, and then we move on to the next thing. Did that make you more curious as you worked on this?

LM: Yeah, you totally did. Especially these days with Google, if you have a question, it’s very easy to go there and have Wikipedia as the first primer and sometimes the last primer. I think it reminded me that the world as we know it is much less well known than we think. It’s so easy to think that we are in control of everything now – and that science knows it, and we’ve figured out mostly everything. And maybe one new bacterium will be discovered, but basically, we’ve removed it. And that was too far from that.

We are just so deep at all times, in the midst of these paradigmatic revolutions and transformations. And we’re not done. We didn’t get anywhere. We are in clumsy, rough guesses, better for our worldview. There is plenty of waiting in the wings.

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