Lulu Miller opens Why Fish Don’t Exist by reminding the reader that chaos eventually comes for everything including the places and people we love the most. It is “the only sure thing in the world. The master that rules us all” (3). She introduces David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who fought against chaos in the world by working for decades to discover and name a fifth of all the fish species that are known today. When an earthquake shattered the jars containing thousands of species he collected, he responded by carefully sewing the names of species onto their bodies. Miller describes how early in her career as a science journalist, this act seemed to her a sign of overconfidence in humanity’s ability to resist chaos. Yet as she grew older, she began to see a kind of nobility in Starr’s unwillingness to surrender to chaos, and she set out to discover more. 

In Chapter 1, Miller writes that David Jordan was born in 1851 in New York state and was interested in ordering nature from a young age, learning all the names of the stars in the night sky (for which he was allowed to choose ‘Starr’ for his middle name).