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.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
why fish don't exist (1)
David Starr Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy he was fascinated by the stars and curious about the name and significance of the celestial bodies. When he was about eight, he got an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. In five years he got his curiosity satisfied.
He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.
Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.
He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.
After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”
As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau in 1880 to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.
He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.
He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.
Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.
But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.
Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”
Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.
In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.
In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.
He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.
Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.
And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.
So what did David do?
To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.
Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.
David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.
He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.
Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.
He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.
After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”
As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau in 1880 to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.
He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.
He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.
Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.
But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.
Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”
Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.
In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.
In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.
He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.
Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.
And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.
So what did David do?
To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.
Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.
David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.
Thursday, April 2, 2020
authenticity
In the fifties and early sixties, American TV shows idealized traditional families and suburban life so much people had an undercurrent fear that they might become a cookie cutter human being defined by the externals.
Today, with selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, everyone seems to have become their own unabashed promoter. The new social mantra "Follow your passions. Do what you love" enjoins everyone to have some dream about their life and you are authentic to the extent that you doggedly pursue that vision as though it were your essence.
What does authenticity mean, and what does it mean to live authentically?
In Camus' novel "The Stranger", the protagonist commits a senseless murder but, in the end, is sentenced to death largely because he refuses to tell the officials and others what they want to hear, namely that he is sorry, which he isn't.
"In order to be, never try to seem," that seems to be one stern advise
Camus wants to tell us through the story.
Is there, however, more to authenticity than just "don't pretend"? Though Sartre tries, he can find no precise distinction between sincerity and authenticity as one might differentiate between tables and chairs, nor is it possible to generate an unambiguous criterion for deciding whether or not we are leading authentic lives. Perhaps like all ingredients of inner life, authenticity is something you just can't put on a scale and tell how much it weighs.
Etymologically speaking, both in Latin and in German, the idea of authenticity comes from the notion of making something your own. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many 19- and 20-year-olds, many of them first-generation college students whose parents had to dig deeply to send them to college, boarded buses southbound to help register voters and fight racism, knowing full well the maelstrom of violence they were driving into. That was authenticity on two counts. They were not taking marching orders from their parents or society in general, and they were acting on their own conviction.
"Be true to yourself", then, sounds like one great simple way to be authentic. The trick, and the trap to avoid, though, is how not to become a narcissist or self-righteous bigot following such easily turned self-serving moral guideline. After all, it could be argued that there were millions of Nazis who did just that, and hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their last breath defending slavery.
"If authenticity is being true to ourselves ... then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole," says contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor in his book "The Ethics of Authenticity".
Relational creatures as we humans are, it could be that becoming our own person is only possible via strong bonds to something outside of ourselves. For Kierkegaard it is God, while Taylor submits this connection can take the form of binding yourself to a "political cause or tending to the earth."
Maybe we have taken this all wrong. Authenticity is not something we can work at, all we can do is to make efforts to avoid inauthenticity. So, for example, being vulnerable makes you closer to authenticity, while "faking it until you make it" makes you less so.
Or maybe authenticity is something we were born with, that got lost/buried under layers of layers of pseudo knowledge
as we got "educated" by culture, society and lots of our own "self-help" efforts. The task then is to shake off the chaff and shackles and get back to the original, "返璞歸真," as the Taoists would say.
Or follow a plan that is there from the start, to become who you truly are in God, as Kierkegaard would say.
* This writing is based on Chapter "Authenticity" of the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide".
Monday, March 23, 2020
faith
I was out of town when the Philosophy Club group discussed the chapter "Faith" from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" a few months ago. Now I've re-read it, my take is as follows:
The chapter started with the author--a non-practicing Catholic--recalling one accidental visit to a church one late afternoon when his original intent was to a bar, and could not work up a single candle at the chapel to light up for his long deceased father. As he left the church, feeling silly with such non-serendipitous event, a question nevertheless popped up in his head: Do we lose our faith or we push it away?
It's easy for a modern man to revolt against a faith whose truths are based on the "indisputable facts" of virgin birth and bodily resurrection. The argument that "God is beyond human understanding" sounds hollow and apologetic. Religion as a category could well be written off as an antiquated invention by humans for humans, their needs for assurance and protection at basic, and meaning and purpose at higher up psycho-emotional-spiritual levels.
For existentialists such as Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. His prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.
The chapter started with the author--a non-practicing Catholic--recalling one accidental visit to a church one late afternoon when his original intent was to a bar, and could not work up a single candle at the chapel to light up for his long deceased father. As he left the church, feeling silly with such non-serendipitous event, a question nevertheless popped up in his head: Do we lose our faith or we push it away?
It's easy for a modern man to revolt against a faith whose truths are based on the "indisputable facts" of virgin birth and bodily resurrection. The argument that "God is beyond human understanding" sounds hollow and apologetic. Religion as a category could well be written off as an antiquated invention by humans for humans, their needs for assurance and protection at basic, and meaning and purpose at higher up psycho-emotional-spiritual levels.
For existentialists such as Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. His prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.
Kierkegaard disagrees. In his book "Fear and Trembling" he writes:
"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"
"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.
For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:
A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.
An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.
The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.
Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.
In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.
"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"
"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.
For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:
A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.
An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.
The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.
Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.
In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.
Friday, March 20, 2020
love
The Philosophy Club meetup group I've been attending since last year has focused their discussions on topics from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" by Gordon Marino in the past few months. Due to the on-going pandemic, the meetup was canceled this week but we were encouraged to continue sharing our thoughts in alternative ways possible. So I wrote and shared with the group my take on the chapter titled "Love":
The main idea he then spent the latter third of the chapter, using Dostoyevsky's “Underground Man” story to explain, is that one has to deem oneself lovable before they can accept others' love and be capable of loving others as well.
Two issues on making thyself lovable: how to get rid of those self loathing feelings (guilt, shame, unworthiness, inadequacy, etc.), and how to avoid becoming a narcissist on the way to achieving self-love?
The answer to the first can be theological: a third party (God, religion) that can absolve the guilt/shame/unworthiness complex one has; or rational: by realizing all humans are equal, comparison is unnecessary, none is superior nor inferior to any other, therefore self loathing is unnecessary .
As to how not to become a narcissist while trying to love thyself, the book doesn't give a direct answer, but seems to indicate a non-human reference, an out-of-this-world role model is needed, so one can turn their egotistic eyes away from other human beings who they treat as mirrors of their own reflections anyway, and stop the endless struggle to establish themselves as a subject among others trying to do the same who are as flawed as they are in the first place.
And how can/does one love another person? Again a theological answer coming from Kierkegaard, is through the “command” of God, that asks His believers to "presuppose there is love in others" and do “love works” to uncover it; while a secular, existentialistic, but also Kierkegaardian answer, in my opinion, is treat it as a mystical goal that's unachievable but needs to be pursued anyway, all the way, by faith.
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