WHY FISH DON’T EXIST – by Lulu Miller

Reflections on the Dandelion Principle

“Why Fish Don’t Exist,” the book written by Lulu Miller, may at first seem like a story about taxonomy and classification. Long after finishing it, however, one question stayed with me: isn’t choosing taxonomy a risky way to talk about something far more profound? Why write about classifying fish when the real stake is how humans try to make sense of the world and impose order on life?

Lulu Miller’s book is not about David Starr Jordan – the celebrated taxonomist and founding president of Stanford University – nor is it about eugenics in a strictly historical sense. It is about who gets to define reality, who decides what is considered “normal,” and what happens to those who do not fit within that order.

Lulu belongs to the second category. Throughout her life, she has carried the feeling that she does not fit, that she cannot find a place within the predetermined order of society. Her research into Jordan’s life emerges as a need to understand how an ordinary man – much like herself – with no exceptional qualities, could become a superstar capable of shaping millions of lives across two continents, and still be honored today with statues and mountains bearing his name.

On a first reading, David Starr Jordan becomes a fantasy of stability: the promise that existence is not chaos, but something that can be understood. Exactly what a young woman suffering from anxiety and depression, unable to adapt to the rhythm of a life considered “normal,” would need.

Jordan does not merely organize the natural world, but the entire social world as well. More than that, he believes morally in his order. He does not say only, “this is how the world looks,” but “this is how the world should look.”

In the book, he does not appear as a main character, but as the symbol of an order built without doubt. Not brilliant, not profound, not exceptional – just sufficiently free of ambiguity to name the world on behalf of others. He is not troubled by exceptions, not affected by suffering, and does not pause to reflect on the consequences of his ideas for real people. In the historical context of the early twentieth century, this was enough.

Through this lens, Lulu shows us how the society we inhabit was constructed. Power is not exercised only through force, but through dehumanization and through the absence of compassion toward those who do not share the traits of the majority.

The world into which Lulu was born was not “wrong out of ignorance.” It was built by narrow minds that held power. The world is already explained, the categories already given, normality already established.

Where, then, is one supposed to move? In which direction?

This is the inertia in which Lulu lives at the beginning of the book, and which she cannot overcome through theory or research. Lulu is not paralyzed by a lack of information, but by its excess. When reality is presented as complete, any movement becomes deviant.

The way out of this paralysis does not come through theory, but through encounter. The encounter with two survivors of a eugenics center – women who were classified, reduced to categories, confined and abused, and who nevertheless survived.

Not as ideas.
But as living beings.

There, Lulu understands that life is not defended through rigidity, but through compassion. A social order that has normalized the absence of compassion is incompatible with life.

Only then is Lulu ready to understand that fish do not exist.

The problem was never that Lulu did not fit. The problem was the world that once decided who is allowed to exist and who deserves to be treated with dignity. And perhaps the way out is not to find another box in which to fit, but to accept that not fitting is sometimes the only proof that we are alive.

The era of David Starr Jordan has not disappeared. It survives in small, everyday gestures, wherever vulnerability is treated as fault and a cry for help becomes an inconvenience.

The fear of being different is not a remnant of the past. It is a healthy reaction in a world that still punishes fragility.

“Why Fish Don’t Exist” does not abolish social order.
It exposes an inhuman normality that we have learned to accept far too easily.