Quote Origin: I Regret To Report That There Is Surely No Such Thing as a Fish

Posted byquoteresearch

Stephen Jay Gould? George Lakoff? Delta Willis? Steven Pinker? Stephen Fry?

A green piano with red and black keys
Public domain illustration of a cladogram

Question for Quote Investigator: A prominent scientist apparently made the following surprising pronouncement:

There is no such thing as a fish.

I do not recall the precise phrasing. Would you please explore the provenance and interpretation of this statement?

Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1981 paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould published a piece in “Natural History†magazine about cladistics which is a method for categorizing organisms based on common ancestry within a phylogenetic tree. A clade is a group of organisms which share a common ancestor. A cladogram is a tree diagram which represents the relationship between organisms.

In the following passage Gould referred to the English author Izaak Walton who wrote “The Compleat Angler†which is a famous book about fishing. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1

Some of our most common and comforting groups no longer exist if classifications must be based on cladograms. With apologies to Mr. Walton and to so many coastal compatriots in New England, I regret to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish.

About 20,000 species of vertebrates have scales and fins and live in water, but they do not form a coherent cladistic group. Some—the lungfishes and the coelacanth in particular—are genealogically close to the creatures that crawled out on land to become amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

In the passage above Gould was explaining the implications of rigorous cladistics. However, his viewpoint was more nuanced. Gould supported the continued use of the word “fishâ€:

The cladogram of trout, lungfish, and elephant is undoubtedly true as an expression of branching order in time. But must classifications be based only on cladistic information? A coelacanth looks like a fish, tastes like a fish, acts like a fish, and therefore — in some legitimate sense beyond hidebound tradition — is a fish.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 1955 the “St. Louis Post-Dispatch†of Missouri published a humorous letter to the editor from a person who had been fishing for years and had never caught a fish. The writer doubted the existence of fish:2

I have fished every place in the world there is to fish and I have never caught anything. I have never seen anyone else catch anything. …

There is no such thing as a fish—at least in the commonly accepted sense. They are a manufactured product propagandized for the profit of the sporting goods manufacturers. Whenever a “fish†is allegedly caught it is a plant.

In 1981 Gould published an article about cladistics in “Natural History†magazine as mentioned previously. In 1983 the article was reprinted in the collection “Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toesâ€.3

In 1987 cognitive linguist George Lakoff published “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mindâ€. The book reprinted the passage containing the quotation from Gould’s article.4

In 1989 Delta Willis published “The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Originsâ€. Willis discussed the viewpoint of Gould and printed a pertinent comment from him:5

He values the work of Willi Hennig, who developed the cladistic method in the fifties, but feels the merits of Hennig’s work have been distorted by the so-called transformed cladists — referred to as “rabid†cladists by their critics. “It’s just another example of taking a system that has interesting things to offer, and making a dogma out of it. In their system, there’s no such thing as Fish. The category doesn’t exist. Technically, it’s called a paraphyletic group.â€

In 1997 Steven Pinker published “How the Mind Worksâ€, and he included a discussion of the controversy concerning the fish category:6

Fish, for example, do not occupy one branch in the tree of life. One of their kind, a lungfish, begot the amphibians, whose descendants embrace the reptiles, whose descendants embrace the birds and the mammals. There is no definition that picks out all and only the fish, no branch of the tree of life that includes salmon and lungfish but excludes lizards and cows.

Taxonomists fiercely debate what to do with categories like fish that are obvious to any child but have no scientific definition because they are neither species nor clades.

Some insist that there is no such thing as a fish; it is merely a layperson’s stereotype. Others try to rehabilitate everyday categories like fish using computer algorithms that sort creatures into clusters sharing properties.

In 2010 the BBC broadcast an episode of the television comedy show “QI (Quite Interesting)†during which the host Stephen Fry referred to the quotation:7

After a lifetime study of fish, biologist Stephen Jay Gould concluded that that there is no such thing as a fish.

In conclusion, Stephen Jay Gould deserves credit writing the statement “there is surely no such thing as a fish†in “Natural History†magazine in 1981. However, the passage containing the quotation was explaining the cladistics perspective. Gould later indicated that it was reasonable for laypeople to continue to use the term “fishâ€.

Image Notes: Public domain illustration of a cladogram from creator Life of Riley at Wikipedia. The image has been resized.

Acknowledgement: Great thanks to David Weinberger whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Weinberger indicated that the remark had been attributed to Stephen Jay Gould. Also, thanks to Fred Barrett who found the “Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes†citation.

  1. 1981 July, Natural History, Volume 90, Number 7, This View of Life: What, if Anything, Is a Zebra? by Stephen Jay Gould, Start Page 6, Quote Page 12, Column 1, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  2. 1955 June 19, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Section: Letters From the People, Letter Title: There Are No Fish!, Letter From: John Slaton, Quote Page 2C, Column 1, St. Louis, Missouri. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  3. 1983 Copyright, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, Chapter 28: What, if Anything, Is a Zebra?, Start Page 355, Quote Page 363, W. W. Norton & Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  4. 1990 (1987 Copyright), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff, Chapter 8: More About Cognitive Models, Quote Page 119, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  5. 1989 Copyright, The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Origins by Delta Willis, Chapter 11: Shared Characters, Quote Page 274, Viking Penguin: A Division of Penguin Books, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  6. 1997, How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, Chapter 5: Good Ideas, Quote Page 311, W. W. Norton & Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  7. DailyMotion video, Title: QI. Series H Episode 3. Hoaxes, Comment: First broadcast 1st October 2010, July 28, 2022 at 2:53PM, Uploaded by: deaddogsmoking, (Quotation starts at 24 minute 21 seconds of 43 minutes 54 seconds) (This video excerpt is QI: Quite Interesting), (Accessed on youtube.com on December 2, 2024) ↩︎