Why Fish Don't Exist

What would you think if someone told you that, scientifically speaking, "fish" don't exist?

Lulu Miller is an American science journalist. When she was seven, she asked her father, a scientist, what the meaning of life was. None, he said. You matter no more than an ant. That answer followed her for years, until her own life fell apart and she found herself thinking about one particular man.

His name was David Starr Jordan: first president of Stanford University and the most famous fish taxonomist of his era, who discovered and named about a fifth of the fish species known at the time. In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, decades of his collection were smashed. Glass jars shattered everywhere, and the name labels lay scattered among the fish. Standing in the wreckage, he didn't despair. He found a sewing needle and began stitching names, one by one, directly onto every fish he could still identify.

Miller wanted to know what kind of faith lets a man take on chaos armed with a needle. She expected to write an inspiring story. But the deeper she dug, the clearer Jordan's other side became: his obsession with "order" eventually led him to eugenics, to ranking human beings from higher to lower.

And the book's real twist is hiding in its title.

Order is something we draw, not the way the world actually is. Later biologists, using new methods to redraw the tree of life, found that "fish" isn't a valid category at all: a lungfish is more closely related to a cow than to a salmon. Categories help us understand the world, and they can just as easily be turned into weapons against people.

"Useless" usually just means "not yet seen." Dandelions keep turning up in the book: a weed to one person, medicine and food to another. Whatever gets labeled useless may simply be waiting for someone to look at it from a different angle.

Let go of the label "fish," and you finally see each fish. The same goes for people.

For me, this is the best book to read when things are going badly. It convinced me not to understand the world through other people's labels, and not to understand myself through them either. The meaning of your life comes from the order you build yourself.

Read it if your life feels like a mess right now, or if you feel trapped by a label.

Chaos, Miller comes to see, is the one thing in this world you can count on.