1. A Boy with His Head in the Stars

• David Starr Jordan (DSJ) → grew up bringing order to Chaos
  • Born 1851, as a child loved & learned the stars (chose middle name Starr), made maps, studied flowers
  • Turned to collecting flowers after his father died
  • Just as Darwin was publishing
• Compulsive collective actually known to soothe stress & anxiety, gives a sense of personal efficacy even there seems to be none

2. A Prophet on an Island

• Louis Agassiz = Swiss geologist → early proposer of ice age theory, best way to teach science is through nature vs books
  • Every species = “thought of God” → taxonomy = translating His thoughts into human language
  • Nature holds moral code hidden in hierarchical organization of nature, and thus instructions on how to be better
  • Rank organisms via structural complexity (especially anatomy), relation to surroundings, social behaviors
  • Led to very racist views
• Held course on Penikese Island in MA for naturalists that DSJ attended

3. A Godless Interlude

• Author’s father’s worldview: (In the grand scheme of the universe...) You don’t matter, so live as you please. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.
• How do you find order and sense amidst the Chaos of the world?
  • Agassiz found it by God
  • Darwin did not: Natura non favor saltum → Nature does not jump
    • No hard lines or edges... makes the task of taxonomy seem impossible (so much grey area)

4. Chasing Tail

• DSJ → ichthyology, began work on taxonomy of fish, eventually became well-known for discoveries
• Asked by Stanford family to help with their “academic experiment” → first president of the university
  • Built Hopkins Seaside Laboratory
• Lots of exotic expeditions, discovered 1k+ fish species

5. Genesis in a Jar

• Holotype = preserved specimen of a species that represents it
  • Cannot be replaced if lost— replacement is a lowly neophyte
• DSJ’s obsessive push for discovery may have been fueled by grief over losses of friends, family
• Began losing support of Jane Stanford— didn’t think fish were that important— but then she died, and all was well

6. Smash

• Disastrous when earthquake destroyed collection of specimen— if unable to identify some when containers broke, would be lost to science until rediscovered

7. The Indestructible

• Kafka: the Indestructible = at the bottom of every person, keeps them going wherever they feel like going or not
  • Not related to optimism— deeper than that, less “self-conscious”

8. On Delusion

• The power of telling positively-biased stories about ourselves, holding (perhaps unjustified) positive opinions, “shield of optimism”
  • → healthier patients, more successful students and workers
  • Became marker of “well-adjusted” people, despite kind of being a delusion
  • Associated with grit, resilience
  • DSJ = example of how “a good dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds”
• However! Recent research → might not be all that!
  • Positive self-illusions usually drive others away
  • Short term benefit, but masks long term accumulation of pain
  • Lash out more in response to criticism

9. The Bitterest Thing in the World

• DSJ behind Jane Stanford’s death?
  • Poison found in her system = same substance he used in capture of fish...
  • Her death never fully investigated

10. A Veritable Chamber of Horrors

• DSJ began to champion and spread idea of eugenics
  • One of first to bring it to America
  • Advocated for sterilization of the “unfit”
  • Believed life could “degenerate,” ex. sea squirts devolving from fish
• Eugenics overlooks value of variation
  • Dandelion principle: in some contexts, a dandelion is a weed to be killed; in others, it’s a valuable medicinal herb to be cultivated
  • Ecological complexity is often beyond human comprehension
• Supreme Court ruling in favor of government-dictated forced sterilization still stands

11. The Ladder

• Agassiz’s idea of a natural hierarchy with humans/gods at the top = countered by Darwin: no jumps in nature (no rungs on the ladder)
  • Some animals outperform humans at every possible potential measure of superiority (memory, recently evolved, tool use, altruism)
  • Perhaps DSJ clung to the concept for the vision and comfort of a natural order

12. Dandelions

• Psychiatric facilities from early 1900s = forerunners to concentration camps
• Dandelion principle → no single way to rank nature; depends on your perspective
  • “We matter,” in some of these!

13. Deus ex Machina

• DSJ = renowned as a pacifist— but this was motivated by eugenicist ends, the desire to “save” a nation’s best from war
• Ignored all the support and labor he received from immigrants, the poor (people he deemed “unfit”) in his scientific work
• Why is there no official taxonomic category for fish?
  • Not actually a deprecate group that broke off from the tree of life, but a collection of many branches from different origins, at different times
  • Ex. the lungfish is more closely related to a cow, which also has lungs, than to a salmon
  • Example of convergence

Epilogue

• To unlock the other world that exists in this one, all you have to do is stay wary of words
  • The order we do seek does not ecist