Why Fish Don't Exist
A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
by Lulu Miller · first published 2020
75% recommend25% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Narrative nonfiction about Stanford's founding president, an obsessive ichthyologist, that doubles as a personal exploration of identity and purpose. Readers call it entertaining, fast, and a good taxonomy intro.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered. Many might have given up,
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Same goes for fish, which I just read in the excellent book "Why Fish Don't Exist" by Lulu Miller. An example being that a lungfish has more attributes similar to a cow than to a salmon.
on “A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine” ↗Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller Lulu Miller, a host of the Invisibilia podcast, turns what at first is a simple story about an obsessive taxonomist, David Starr Jordan, into a deeply personal and poignant exploration…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller was a great one for me. Surface level it’s a book about a great but immensely flawed scientist. Under the surface it’s about identity and purpose. Binged it in like 2 nights.
on “Ask HN: Best books read in 2022” ↗There is an entertaining book related to this. Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50887097-why-fish-don-t-...
on “Eels are fish” ↗The first line of this essay talks about fish not existing either. For anyone interested in this subject (albeit from a different angle) I highly recommend the book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” [1]. It’s only really a little bit about fish, the founding president of Stanford (who was an obsessive ichthyologist), and his eugenics agenda. It’s also part memoir. I found it very touching and quite…
on “There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically” ↗There's a book: "Why Fish Don't Exist" which is pretty good. Evolutionary, my understanding is that things are usually named after their ancestry (phylogenetically?), while fish are basically... "have fish shape and is in water" which becomes…
on “But good sir, what is electricity?” ↗…accused of covering up the murder of Jane Stanford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan. Oh, he was a eugenicist too, but I guess that's less surprising? (Covered at length in the book "Why Fish Don't Exist")
on “Internal review finds falsified data in Stanford President’s Alzheimer research” ↗Or the book "why fish don't exist", which got a lot of press last year if you consume media outside of youtube.
on “Eels are fish” ↗