On Sto­ries and Sci­ence, Plus Fish

by Janie

It's prob­a­bly fair to say that peo­ple, when afraid, turn to sto­ries and to sci­ence for so­lace. The last year and a half has solid­ified that: the yarns spun range from cons­piracy the­o­ries to es­capist nov­els that tran­sport the reader far, far away from bleaker re­al­i­ties (The Mid­night Li­brary phen­omenon, any­one?), and ev­i­dence of new­found pub­lic in­ter­est in sci­ence mani­fests in signs like the spike in world­wide Google searches for "poly­merase chain reac­tion" and August's announce­ment of the new col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Al­fred P. Sloan Foun­da­tion and the Na­tional Book Foun­da­tion to en­courage engage­ment with sci­ence in liter­ature.

Fig­ure 1. Why Fish Don't Ex­ist Book Cover. Source. Fron­tis­piece.

On that note, I re­cently read Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Ex­ist. It's an amal­gam of a book that's part mem­oir, part bio­graphy, part philo­sophical mus­ing, part bildungs­roman, and part mur­der mys­tery, with tid­bits of sci­ence all through­out. It's about the author's per­sonal life, some ma­rine bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian the­ory, a look back at his­tor­i­cal heretic sci­en­tists, and the story of David Starr Jor­dan, the very prob­lematic ichthy­ologist who discov­ered nearly a fifth of the world's known fish species. Not to men­tion some cyano­bacteria appre­ciation.

Weeks af­ter read­ing it, I'm still think­ing about it. Maybe it af­fected me so much be­cause of the on­go­ing pan­demic mi­lieu. It's about be­ing small but se­cure in the world (like mi­crobes!). It's not about means to var­i­ous ends – a wel­come lull in all of the mat­erial and teleo­logical nar­ratives in mod­ern life. It's thought­ful, it's sober­ing, it's right­fully messy, it's vis­ceral, it's sad­dening and some­times un­fair, and it's also up­lifting. Most of all, I read it as an ode to curios­ity. Admit­tedly, I would have appre­ciated more of a dis­cussion about race, consid­ering that ichthy­ologist Jor­dan was an aw­ful bigot and eu­gen­ics ad­vocate, but I found it to be a compel­ling story that's one facet of find­ing per­sonal mean­ing amid dis­order.

To­wards the end of the book, the au­thor has a quote from W.B. Yeats: "There is an­other world, but it is in this one." I love this quote. I've writ­ten it down in three dif­ferent places. It's some­thing in line with my convic­tion that af­ter bio­logical re­search seeks out what makes life move, cre­ative writ­ing is what un­cov­ers mean­ing from that for peo­ple and so­ci­ety. It's some­thing emblem­atic of writ­ing, sto­ries, imagin­ation, and sci­ence.

It says yes, there are endo­symbioses to be found every­where, and not just within cells.