Narrator: In the early hours of April 18, 1906, the world came undone. A massive earthquake tore through San Francisco, and on the campus of Stanford University, a man's life's work was shattered into a million pieces. David Starr Jordan, the university's president and the world's foremost ichthyologist, had spent decades collecting and naming a fifth of the world's known fish species. Now, his collection lay in a ruin of shattered glass and scattered specimens. The crucial tin name tags, the very identity of each creature, were lost in the chaos. But as he stood in the wreckage, Jordan did not despair. He found a sewing needle and, in a defiant act against entropy itself, began meticulously stitching the names directly onto the flesh of the fish.

This incredible story of resilience is the entry point into Lulu Miller's book, Why Fish Don't Exist. Miller, grappling with her own life's chaos, initially saw Jordan as a hero—a model for how to persist when the world falls apart. But as she dug deeper, she discovered that the same unwavering certainty that allowed him to rebuild his collection also led him down a path of shocking moral corruption. The book is a biography, a scientific investigation, and a personal memoir that uses Jordan's life to explore the dangerous allure of order and the profound beauty found in embracing chaos.

Narrator: David Starr Jordan’s story begins with an innate, almost desperate need for order. As a boy on a New York farm, he was obsessed with categorizing the world around him, first mapping the stars and then the wildflowers. This passion was given a profound sense of purpose when he attended a summer school led by the charismatic Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz.

Agassiz taught his students that nature was not random but a divine text written by God. He believed in the Scala Naturae, or the "ladder of nature," an ancient idea that all living things could be arranged in a fixed hierarchy, from the lowliest bacteria to the most perfect creation: man. For Agassiz, the work of a taxonomist was not just science; it was "missionary work of the highest order," a way to decipher God's plan. This idea electrified Jordan. It transformed his hobby into a sacred calling and gave him a rigid framework—a ladder—to make sense of a messy world. This belief in a natural hierarchy would become the compass for his entire life, guiding his ambition and, ultimately, his gravest errors.

Narrator: Jordan’s commitment to order was most famously tested by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The disaster was not just a professional setback; it was an existential threat. With his collection of over a thousand type specimens—the single, irreplaceable organism used to define an entire species—mutilated and their labels scattered, decades of work were on the verge of being rendered meaningless. It was, as Miller describes, "Genesis in reverse."

Yet, Jordan’s response was immediate and resolute. While others saw only ruin, he saw a problem to be solved. He commanded his colleagues to keep the specimens wet with hoses day and night to prevent decay. And in a moment of brilliant innovation, he took up a needle and thread. By sewing the paper labels directly onto the fish, he created a system of order that was more resilient than before, one that could withstand the next inevitable onslaught of chaos. This act cemented his reputation as an unflappable leader, a man who could stare into the abyss of destruction and impose his will upon it. It was this story of heroic persistence that first captivated the author and set her on the path to understanding him.

Narrator: Jordan's shield of optimism, the very trait that made him so resilient, had a dark and dangerous side. His unwavering belief in his own righteousness allowed him to dismiss any fact—or person—that contradicted his worldview. This is most chillingly demonstrated in the events surrounding the death of his benefactor and superior, Jane Stanford.

In 1905, just a year before the earthquake, Jane Stanford died in a hotel in Hawaii. Multiple doctors and a coroner's jury concluded she had been murdered, poisoned with strychnine. The evidence was overwhelming, and it was, in fact, the second attempt on her life. Yet, when Jordan arrived on the island, he immediately began a systematic campaign to cover up the murder. He hired his own doctor to produce a report claiming she died of natural causes, publicly dismissed the local doctors' findings, and spread the narrative that the elderly woman had simply died from eating too much. He did this to protect the university's reputation and, very likely, his own job, which Jane had been threatening to terminate. This incident reveals a man so committed to maintaining his version of order that he was willing to slander doctors, manipulate the press, and obstruct justice in a murder investigation.

Narrator: The most devastating consequence of Jordan's belief in a natural hierarchy was his wholehearted embrace of eugenics. After losing much of his power at Stanford, he dedicated the last phase of his life to this monstrous pseudoscience. Twisting Darwin's ideas, he argued that society's "best" men were killed in war, leaving the "unfit"—the poor, the disabled, the "feebleminded"—to reproduce and degrade the human race. The ladder of nature that Agassiz had taught him to see everywhere now became a tool for judging human worth.

Jordan became a leading voice in the American eugenics movement, advocating for laws that would allow for the forced sterilization of thousands. His ideology found its ultimate legal expression in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell. The case involved Carrie Buck, a young woman who was institutionalized and sterilized against her will simply because she, her mother, and her infant daughter were deemed "feebleminded." In his infamous ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Jordan’s abstract belief in a hierarchy had become a brutal reality, a weapon used by the state to violate the bodies and lives of its most vulnerable citizens.

Narrator: In a moment of profound cosmic irony, the very foundation of David Starr Jordan's life's work eventually crumbled. Decades after his death, a new scientific method called cladistics emerged. By analyzing evolutionary lineage, cladists proved that the category "fish" is not a scientifically valid group. Some "fish," like the lungfish, are more closely related to humans than they are to other "fish," like sharks. The neat, orderly category Jordan had dedicated his life to was, in fact, an artificial human invention. The ladder had no rungs.

For the author, this "death of the fish" becomes a powerful metaphor. It symbolizes the collapse of all rigid, human-imposed hierarchies. Rejecting Jordan’s ladder, she instead finds wisdom in Darwin’s true message: that life is not a climb toward perfection but a vast, interconnected web. She illustrates this with the "Dandelion Principle." To a eugenicist, a dandelion is a weed to be eradicated. But to a child, it's a wish; to a bee, a mating bed; to an herbalist, medicine. Its worth is not a fixed point on a ladder but is defined by its relationships to everything around it. By letting go of the need for a simple hierarchy, the author finds a more profound and truer source of meaning in the messy, chaotic, and beautiful interconnectedness of all life.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Why Fish Don't Exist is that the rigid categories and hierarchies we impose on the world are often dangerous fictions. David Starr Jordan’s life serves as a harrowing cautionary tale: a belief in a "ladder of nature" can begin as a source of purpose but can curdle into a justification for prejudice, cruelty, and even murder. His unwavering certainty, once a source of strength, became his greatest moral failing.

The book challenges us to look at our own lives and identify the "ladders" we have built—the rigid beliefs about success, identity, and the worth of others. It asks a difficult but vital question: What might we discover if we had the courage to let those ladders fall and embrace the beautiful, chaotic, and interconnected web that lies below?