Birds aren’t real is a satirical conspiracy theory that took off amongst Gen-Z in response to the sea of misinformation my generation was exposed to. The theory purports that birds are actually drones operated by the US government to spy on civilians. Of all the conspiracy theories, jokes and internet culture I have consumed over the years, I saw myself in this one: self-aware, filled with angst and using humor and solidarity as a mechanism to relieve myself of the strain that has come from figuring out what is true, false or ambiguous.
Growing up in an era of information overload fueled by silicon and receiving ALL the information in the world in sub millisecond latency, has been a roller coaster. I often feel exhausted and overwhelmed going through hundreds of articles, listening to audios and videos of online personas, and being sold some product through advertisements and endorsements all the time. I have come to value the truth and those who share it with a kindness. I often look at members of my family and friend circles, who feel proud of their education, intelligence or pedigree when they are right about something and feel inferior when they get a fact wrong. Often, we forget to see the humanity in people: where we make mistakes or carry assumptions about the world based on singular experiences. Finding the truth is hard. It involves often verifying sources thoroughly, accounting for bias, finding reliable data, challenging firm beliefs that have creeped in from birth, and conducting experiments to determine the nature of truth in its absence. It is a tiring process. In contrast, I have felt happy to be corrected when I am wrong as I walk out of this transaction with a more accurate mental model of the world, and am grateful for those who share it.
All this being said, I am also incredibly grateful to be born in the time I am born in. For all the misinformation I am exposed to, I also have access to so much information; More that I can possibly fathom in my life time. It is a privilege to get answers, opinions and perspectives to any question in the world indexed in reliable fault-tolerant databases. It forces me to question everything I know, learn some things and unlearn somethings. I will leave you guys with a hard truth I recently uncovered:
Fish don’t exist.
I hear you. You’re probably thinking I’m a little wacko. I felt the same when I learnt this truth.
A cow. A salmon. A lungfish. Which of these things was not like the other?
You would probably say cow.
According to Cladistics, a modern classification of organisms based on common ancestry, you are quite wrong.
The cladists would remind you to focus on finding the shared evolutionary novelties. If you could, for just one moment, not be blinded by the cloak of scales, then you would begin to notice other, more revealing similarities. The lungfish and the cow, for instance—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). The salmon? Alas, epiglottis-less.And the lungfish’s heart is structured more like a cow’s than a salmon’s. The list goes on and on. Leading the students, finally, to the conclusion that the lungfish is more closely related to the cow than to the salmon.
That “fish” as a sound evolutionary category is totally bunk. It would be like saying, as Yoon puts it, “all the animals with red spots on them” are in the same category, “or all the mammals that are loud.” Fine, it’s a category you can make. But it’s scientifically meaningless. It tells you nothing about evolutionary relationships.
Recently, I read Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. It was a memoir of Stanford University’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who studied and classified fish in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
David Starr Jordan spent his life discovering more than 2500 species of fish; but his entire classifciation system falls short to that of the Cladists of the late 1900s. Miller digs in to the life of this bold figure who is in the heart of Stanford’s ethos and uncovers what it truly was: Support of pseudo science like eugenics, a fight for power through murder and false convictions.
This truth shared by Miller is a powerful one. It makes me question what else I hold true about the world that can perhaps be seen through a more meaningful lens.
References
- Miller, L. (n.d.). Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. Simon and Schuster.