In David's own estimate, out of the 12,000–13,000 species of fish known to humans in his day, he and his students had discovered over 2,500 of them. One out of every five in the world, that was.
What drove him to such monumental tasks, to persist and persevere while catastrophes struck, again and again?
He had “a terrifying capacity for convincing himself that what he wanted was right,” writes scholar Luther Spoehr, “His ability to crush those in his path multiplied even as he became convinced that his path was the one of righteousness which led to progress.”
A belief system likely seeded by his youth time idol, the naturalist Louis Agassiz (whose statue stands outside the marine research building commissioned by David at Stanford), whose summer camp inspired David to the field of Ichthyology study.
Agassiz believed there were objective measures about organisms, such as “the complication or simplicity of their structure” or “the character of their relations to the surrounding world,” that could be used to rank organisms in their proper order. Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they “bestow greater care upon their offspring.” Parasites, meanwhile, were clear lowlifes, the lot of them. Just look at how they earned their living: they mooched and deceived and freeloaded.
He believed there is a ladder built into nature. A divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that points objectively toward better. The highest of creatures could fall from their rungs if they weren’t careful, that bad habits could somehow cause a species to physically and cognitively decline.
When Darwin's evolution theory became the zeitgeist of late 19th century, David mashed it with Agassiz’s foggy idea of “degeneration” and ran with it. In a scientific paper, David proposed that the sea squirt, a sedentary sac of a filter feeder, had once been a higher fish but had “degraded” into its current form due to a combination of “idleness, inactivity and dependence.”
David was one of the first to bring Eugenics ideas that started in England to America. As early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fever, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University, informing students that traits like “pauperism” and “degeneracy” were heritable and thus could be “exterminated just as swamps are drained.”
He published his first pro-eugenics article in 1898 and followed it with a flurry of books advocating for the cleansing of the gene pool. He made stops at churches and almshouses, where he’d warn the devoted staffs about the dangers of their work fomenting, as he claimed it did, “the survival of the unfit.”
In 1907, a few of his friends from Bloomington successfully legalized forced eugenic sterilization in Indiana—the first such law not just in the country but in the world. Two years later, David helped get it passed in California. His commitment to the cause apparent, he was asked to chair the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association. He eagerly accepted.
Now back to the fish story, and a bit evolutionary mumbo jumbo.
How do evolutionary biologists classify creatures found on earth? Starting in 1990s, "cladistic" method is the most common one used. What does cladistic method do? Simply put, it categorizes organisms in groups ("clades") based on the most recent common ancestor.
For example, if you want to talk about group "vertebrates", that includes all creatures with a backbone, then snakes are in, worms are out. Group "mammals"? It must include every single descendant of that first creature able to make milk. Cats, dogs, whales, all good. No reptiles allowed!
Quiz: A cow. A salmon. A lungfish. Which of these things is not like the other?
If you could, for a moment, allow yourself not be blinded by the outer look of these creatures (such as the scales of the salmon and the lungfish) but focus on their shared evolutionary traits, then you would begin to notice: the lungfish and the cow both have lung-like organs that allow them to breathe air while the salmon does not; the lungfish and the cow both have an epiglottis (a small flap of skin that covers the windpipe) while the salmon is epiglottis-less; and the lungfish’s heart is structured more like a cow’s than a salmon’s, etc., etc., etc. All leading to the conclusion that the lungfish is more closely related to the cow than to the salmon.
Using method like this, taxonomists conclude that fish, as a legitimate category of creature, do not exist.
We human mind intuitively and summarily groups all creatures living in water with scaled skin, swinging fins, sleek body as one kind and call them fish, but by that same logic, we should treat all creatures living in mountains, for example, mountain goats, mountain toads, mountain eagles, and mountain men, as one kind and call them one same name, but we don't.
To conclude the story, let's give some equal opportunity time to Darwin:
Contrary to David and Agassiz's assertion of a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that points objectively toward better, Darwin sees no ladder in nature.
Nature doesn’t jump, he says. Species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believed to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our convenience. Nature has no edges, no hard lines. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.”
And what does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species? Variation. In nearly every chapter of "Origin of Species," Darwin hails the power of “Variation.” He marvels over how diverse gene pools are healthier and stronger, how inter-crossing between different types of individuals gives more “vigor and fertility” to their offspring, how even worms and plants that can produce perfect replicas of themselves are equipped for sex, for introducing variety back into the gene pool.
And maybe every little interaction between creatures, sentient ones in particular—the affection, good will, compassion..., makes life bind closer, jell better,
evolve higher, proves that we exist, with or without label, categorizable or not!
* This 4-part write-up is based on the book "Why Fish Don't Exist" by Lulu Miller I recently finished reading. Hope it gives you enough distraction from the lockdown and endless bombardment of the corona virus news we are all facing now. Cheers!
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Saturday, May 2, 2020
why fish don't exist (3)
Upon learning that Jane Stanford's death would likely be ruled a poisoning, David set sail for Hawaii.
Though he told the New York Times his visit had “nothing whatever to do with the investigation which the police of San Francisco and Honolulu are conducting,” that he was there only to escort Jane’s body home, records show he hired a new doctor and paid him the hefty sum of $350—about $10,000 today—to reexamine the case.
The man David selected, Ernest Waterhouse, had only been practicing medicine for a couple of years. Without examining the body or any of the evidence, and after a skim of a book on poisoning, conversations with a couple of the witnesses, and a series of meetings with David, in his hands the explanation of Jane’s death took an acrobatic turn.
In a typed memo to David (which David had instructed he prepare for him), Dr. Waterhouse declared that he was “decidedly not” convinced that Jane Stanford had been poisoned. Though concerned by the amount of strychnine found in her belly and bottle, he wasn’t sure it was enough to have killed her. So how to explain the violent convulsions, the lockjaw, the whole rapid death thing? Gingerbread!
Now Bertha — Jane's personal assistant — said that the gingerbread prepared by the hotel for Jane's picnic had not been freshly cooked, as she had originally testified to the police (and the hotel continued to claim), but under-cooked. And not only did Jane inhaled gob after gob of the sloppy, eggy dough, she also sucked down eight sandwiches, filled with thick slabs of beef tongue and Swiss cheese, multiple cups of cold coffee, and over a dozen French candies.
So, as David informed the New York Times, that he was “wholly convinced” that Jane's death was due to heart failure triggered by a combination of overexertion (from a leisurely picnic outing?) and consuming “a surfeit of unsuitable food.”
When the statement went public, the Hawaii doctors were horrified. They banded together and immediately released a counter-statement, which read:
"She did not die of angina pectoris because neither the symptoms of the attack nor the condition of the heart confirms that diagnosis. It is imbecile to think that a woman of Mrs. Stanford’s age and known mental characteristics might have died of an hysterical seizure in half an hour.… No Board of Health in existence could allow a certificate based on such a cause of death to go unchallenged."
David retorted by calling the key medical witness, Dr. Humphris, “a man without professional or personal standing.” When the Hawaii doctors rushed to Humphris’ defense, David accused them all of colluding in a conspiracy—fabricating the diagnosis of murder as a way of getting money to perform the autopsy and coroner’s inquest.
A ludicrous accusation. No matter. Because of David's prestige, his power, and probably a nation's disregard for its outlier islands (Hawaii was not yet a state at that time), the Hawaii doctors’ account of what happened never really took hold on the mainland.
Until almost a hundred years later.
Robert Cutler, a Stanford neurologist, stumbled across an old newspaper article about an investigation into the poisoning of Jane Stanford while researching another project. Robert was shocked. He was a history buff and a proud Stanford man. Why had he never heard that the founding mother had potentially been poisoned? So he began digging.
With the help of his wife, Maggie, and a flock of archivists from Honolulu to San Francisco to Washington, DC, he gathered the coroner’s report, the eyewitness testimonies, the court transcripts... all the evidence, laid out as clearly as possible, with long quotations from the primary sources themselves. Then he published the book "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford" in 2003 before he died.
In his book, Robert Cutler, a medical doctor for more than three decades, is clear: given Jane’s symptoms and the discovery of strychnine in both her belly and medicine bottle, he believes she was poisoned. And after tracing David’s actions in the wake of her death, he believes it’s hard not to conclude that David was trying to cover up the poisoning. Why? Perhaps to protect the university from scandal. Perhaps for other reasons. Robert Cutler won’t wager a guess.
Other scholars go further. Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor who studied the letters between Jane and her spy, thought the timing of the murder was fishy. He wrote that David, as a means of protecting his presidency, “had the motive.”
Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information. White’s current guess is that Bertha did it (for the will money), but he remarks that the timing of Jane’s death was remarkably “lucky” for David. He feels increasingly confident that, no matter who did it, David covered up the poisoning.
In one of David's fish-collecting manuals, "A Guide to the Study of Fishes," that advises readers how to find fish anywhere in the world, under the section called “How to Secure Fishes,” he divulges a secret to his readers, his favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. And the particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.
Though he told the New York Times his visit had “nothing whatever to do with the investigation which the police of San Francisco and Honolulu are conducting,” that he was there only to escort Jane’s body home, records show he hired a new doctor and paid him the hefty sum of $350—about $10,000 today—to reexamine the case.
The man David selected, Ernest Waterhouse, had only been practicing medicine for a couple of years. Without examining the body or any of the evidence, and after a skim of a book on poisoning, conversations with a couple of the witnesses, and a series of meetings with David, in his hands the explanation of Jane’s death took an acrobatic turn.
In a typed memo to David (which David had instructed he prepare for him), Dr. Waterhouse declared that he was “decidedly not” convinced that Jane Stanford had been poisoned. Though concerned by the amount of strychnine found in her belly and bottle, he wasn’t sure it was enough to have killed her. So how to explain the violent convulsions, the lockjaw, the whole rapid death thing? Gingerbread!
Now Bertha — Jane's personal assistant — said that the gingerbread prepared by the hotel for Jane's picnic had not been freshly cooked, as she had originally testified to the police (and the hotel continued to claim), but under-cooked. And not only did Jane inhaled gob after gob of the sloppy, eggy dough, she also sucked down eight sandwiches, filled with thick slabs of beef tongue and Swiss cheese, multiple cups of cold coffee, and over a dozen French candies.
So, as David informed the New York Times, that he was “wholly convinced” that Jane's death was due to heart failure triggered by a combination of overexertion (from a leisurely picnic outing?) and consuming “a surfeit of unsuitable food.”
When the statement went public, the Hawaii doctors were horrified. They banded together and immediately released a counter-statement, which read:
"She did not die of angina pectoris because neither the symptoms of the attack nor the condition of the heart confirms that diagnosis. It is imbecile to think that a woman of Mrs. Stanford’s age and known mental characteristics might have died of an hysterical seizure in half an hour.… No Board of Health in existence could allow a certificate based on such a cause of death to go unchallenged."
David retorted by calling the key medical witness, Dr. Humphris, “a man without professional or personal standing.” When the Hawaii doctors rushed to Humphris’ defense, David accused them all of colluding in a conspiracy—fabricating the diagnosis of murder as a way of getting money to perform the autopsy and coroner’s inquest.
A ludicrous accusation. No matter. Because of David's prestige, his power, and probably a nation's disregard for its outlier islands (Hawaii was not yet a state at that time), the Hawaii doctors’ account of what happened never really took hold on the mainland.
Until almost a hundred years later.
Robert Cutler, a Stanford neurologist, stumbled across an old newspaper article about an investigation into the poisoning of Jane Stanford while researching another project. Robert was shocked. He was a history buff and a proud Stanford man. Why had he never heard that the founding mother had potentially been poisoned? So he began digging.
With the help of his wife, Maggie, and a flock of archivists from Honolulu to San Francisco to Washington, DC, he gathered the coroner’s report, the eyewitness testimonies, the court transcripts... all the evidence, laid out as clearly as possible, with long quotations from the primary sources themselves. Then he published the book "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford" in 2003 before he died.
In his book, Robert Cutler, a medical doctor for more than three decades, is clear: given Jane’s symptoms and the discovery of strychnine in both her belly and medicine bottle, he believes she was poisoned. And after tracing David’s actions in the wake of her death, he believes it’s hard not to conclude that David was trying to cover up the poisoning. Why? Perhaps to protect the university from scandal. Perhaps for other reasons. Robert Cutler won’t wager a guess.
Other scholars go further. Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor who studied the letters between Jane and her spy, thought the timing of the murder was fishy. He wrote that David, as a means of protecting his presidency, “had the motive.”
Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information. White’s current guess is that Bertha did it (for the will money), but he remarks that the timing of Jane’s death was remarkably “lucky” for David. He feels increasingly confident that, no matter who did it, David covered up the poisoning.
In one of David's fish-collecting manuals, "A Guide to the Study of Fishes," that advises readers how to find fish anywhere in the world, under the section called “How to Secure Fishes,” he divulges a secret to his readers, his favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. And the particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.
Friday, May 1, 2020
why fish don't exist (2)
Just a year into David’s presidency, Leland Stanford had died and left Jane in charge of affairs. And it was turning out that Jane was not such a fan of the swashbuckling giant after all. She expressed concern about the amount of time and money David was devoting to fish. She wanted the university to expand in other directions, such as, say… the scientific study of spiritualism, where they might find some newfangled technologies that lead to breakthroughs in contacting the dead, such as Jane and Leland's son who died at 15, in whose memory the university was founded. She was also concerned over David’s hiring practices, accused him of nepotism, calling the men he hired in his science departments his "pets."
Her concerns about David's leadership grew to the point where she appointed a spy to keep tabs on him. The spy was a professor in the German department who, after a few years of watching, caught David doing something that didn’t look great. It was not David himself, but a long time student-turned friend of his, who as head of zoology department and a married man, had an affair with a young Stanford woman and were discovered one day by a librarian, who came to David demanding that he be fired for such impropriety. But David did not want to lose this “brilliant taxonomic mind" friend of his, so, thinking on his feet, he threatened the librarian with “incarceration in the insane asylum for sexual perversity” (often code for homosexuality) if he breathed a word of it to anyone else. That succeeded in shutting the librarian up—he quit Stanford, left town. But somehow Jane’s spy got wind of the whole saga, and typed it up in a formal letter to Jane.
In it, he accused David of “whitewashing” a sex scandal to protect a friend, and he claimed that this was far from a lone incident. According to the spy, David ran the university like a “gang,” with faculty members afraid of disagreeing with him for fear of “risking their heads.”
Jane wrote via signed letter to the senior trustee of the school that David’s moral shortcomings had “been painfully evident to me for a long time.” By the end of 1904, rumors abounded that Mrs. Stanford planned to replace David.
Then Jane died, unexpectedly one night in early 1905 while traveling in Hawaii.
On that fatal, sunny day, Jane took a carriage with her entourage to a seaside lookout for a scenic picnic, spending hours sitting in shade, enjoying ocean view, snacking, reading.
In the late afternoon, they returned to the hotel, rested for a bit, and had a light dinner of soup. Then, as Jane was readying herself for bed, she asked one of her assistants, Bertha, to leave out her medications—baking soda and herbal cascara capsules to help with digestion. Bertha left out a spoonful of baking soda and one cascara capsule, and around 9:00 p.m. she and another assistant May retired to their room across the hall.
At approximately 11:15, Jane’s assistants were awakened by cries coming from across the hall. “Bertha! May!” Jane called. “I am so sick!” They hurried to Jane’s room, opened the door, and found Jane keeled over. She was having trouble opening her mouth, her jaw muscles beginning to clamp down against her will. Through widened eyes and barricaded teeth, Jane bleated, “I have no control of my body. I think I have been poisoned again.”
By that point, the man staying next door, having heard the commotion, had rushed over to help. He ran for a doctor. A few minutes later, a sleepy, doe-eyed Dr. Francis Humphris arrived, medicine bag in hand. He sat with Jane, gently palpating her jaw, trying to coax her muscles into relaxing, and finally yanking out her dentures so he could give her some mustard water to induce vomiting. But it was no use. Jane looked at Dr. Humphris with eyes wide as her body began to contort in stranger and stranger ways. Her toes pigeoned inward, her fists clenched into rocks, and her legs splayed open into an unseemly spread-eagle. Helpless, horrified, she stared at something, somewhere just beyond or within her, and pleaded through toothless gums, “Oh God, forgive me my sins.” She was dead, only fifteen minutes after it had all begun, by 11:30.
Two more doctors arrived a few minutes later. One with a stomach pump dangling uselessly from his hand. All three doctors tasted the baking soda remaining in the bottle and noted a foreign, bitter taste. The sheriff arrived and wrapped the spoon and glass in paper and sent them to the toxicologist’s office, and sent Jane’s body to the morgue.
The toxicologists got to work examining the contents of the bottle of baking soda and the contents of Jane’s intestines. They found traces of strychnine in both.
A jury of six citizens was convened. It took them two minutes to settle on a verdict. Jane Stanford, they decided, had died from “strychnine having been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.”
Now you had heard Jane say before her death that she thought she was poisoned again. Why did she say that?
Just about 6 weeks ago, on January 14, 1905, she was at home in her San Francisco town house, getting ready for bed, when she took a big swig of water poured from her usual source, the tank of Poland Spring water in her kitchen. She tasted something so alarming and astringent that she immediately stuck her fingers down her throat to force vomiting.
She summoned her assistants, Bertha and Elizabeth, to help. After calming her, they both tasted the water and, noting a “queer” and “bitter” taste, took the tank to a nearby chemist, who analyzed it and found it contained lethal amounts of strychnine.
Jane survived but was understandably shaken. A detective turned up no leads; the investigation had focused solely on her household staff—the maid, the cook, the secretary, the ex-butler—and ended up clearing everybody.
Knowing there was someone out there who wanted her dead, but not knowing who, Jane set sail for Hawaii, hoping that a few weeks in the tropics would calm her nerves.
That did not pan out, alas.
Her concerns about David's leadership grew to the point where she appointed a spy to keep tabs on him. The spy was a professor in the German department who, after a few years of watching, caught David doing something that didn’t look great. It was not David himself, but a long time student-turned friend of his, who as head of zoology department and a married man, had an affair with a young Stanford woman and were discovered one day by a librarian, who came to David demanding that he be fired for such impropriety. But David did not want to lose this “brilliant taxonomic mind" friend of his, so, thinking on his feet, he threatened the librarian with “incarceration in the insane asylum for sexual perversity” (often code for homosexuality) if he breathed a word of it to anyone else. That succeeded in shutting the librarian up—he quit Stanford, left town. But somehow Jane’s spy got wind of the whole saga, and typed it up in a formal letter to Jane.
In it, he accused David of “whitewashing” a sex scandal to protect a friend, and he claimed that this was far from a lone incident. According to the spy, David ran the university like a “gang,” with faculty members afraid of disagreeing with him for fear of “risking their heads.”
Jane wrote via signed letter to the senior trustee of the school that David’s moral shortcomings had “been painfully evident to me for a long time.” By the end of 1904, rumors abounded that Mrs. Stanford planned to replace David.
Then Jane died, unexpectedly one night in early 1905 while traveling in Hawaii.
On that fatal, sunny day, Jane took a carriage with her entourage to a seaside lookout for a scenic picnic, spending hours sitting in shade, enjoying ocean view, snacking, reading.
In the late afternoon, they returned to the hotel, rested for a bit, and had a light dinner of soup. Then, as Jane was readying herself for bed, she asked one of her assistants, Bertha, to leave out her medications—baking soda and herbal cascara capsules to help with digestion. Bertha left out a spoonful of baking soda and one cascara capsule, and around 9:00 p.m. she and another assistant May retired to their room across the hall.
At approximately 11:15, Jane’s assistants were awakened by cries coming from across the hall. “Bertha! May!” Jane called. “I am so sick!” They hurried to Jane’s room, opened the door, and found Jane keeled over. She was having trouble opening her mouth, her jaw muscles beginning to clamp down against her will. Through widened eyes and barricaded teeth, Jane bleated, “I have no control of my body. I think I have been poisoned again.”
By that point, the man staying next door, having heard the commotion, had rushed over to help. He ran for a doctor. A few minutes later, a sleepy, doe-eyed Dr. Francis Humphris arrived, medicine bag in hand. He sat with Jane, gently palpating her jaw, trying to coax her muscles into relaxing, and finally yanking out her dentures so he could give her some mustard water to induce vomiting. But it was no use. Jane looked at Dr. Humphris with eyes wide as her body began to contort in stranger and stranger ways. Her toes pigeoned inward, her fists clenched into rocks, and her legs splayed open into an unseemly spread-eagle. Helpless, horrified, she stared at something, somewhere just beyond or within her, and pleaded through toothless gums, “Oh God, forgive me my sins.” She was dead, only fifteen minutes after it had all begun, by 11:30.
Two more doctors arrived a few minutes later. One with a stomach pump dangling uselessly from his hand. All three doctors tasted the baking soda remaining in the bottle and noted a foreign, bitter taste. The sheriff arrived and wrapped the spoon and glass in paper and sent them to the toxicologist’s office, and sent Jane’s body to the morgue.
The toxicologists got to work examining the contents of the bottle of baking soda and the contents of Jane’s intestines. They found traces of strychnine in both.
A jury of six citizens was convened. It took them two minutes to settle on a verdict. Jane Stanford, they decided, had died from “strychnine having been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.”
Now you had heard Jane say before her death that she thought she was poisoned again. Why did she say that?
Just about 6 weeks ago, on January 14, 1905, she was at home in her San Francisco town house, getting ready for bed, when she took a big swig of water poured from her usual source, the tank of Poland Spring water in her kitchen. She tasted something so alarming and astringent that she immediately stuck her fingers down her throat to force vomiting.
She summoned her assistants, Bertha and Elizabeth, to help. After calming her, they both tasted the water and, noting a “queer” and “bitter” taste, took the tank to a nearby chemist, who analyzed it and found it contained lethal amounts of strychnine.
Jane survived but was understandably shaken. A detective turned up no leads; the investigation had focused solely on her household staff—the maid, the cook, the secretary, the ex-butler—and ended up clearing everybody.
Knowing there was someone out there who wanted her dead, but not knowing who, Jane set sail for Hawaii, hoping that a few weeks in the tropics would calm her nerves.
That did not pan out, alas.
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