Subject
Re: great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) ...
From
Date
Body
Nabokov's assumption that mimicry exceeds predators' powers of deception has been falsified.
J.A.: What does Boyd mean? Isn't this article sort of substantiating Nabokov's metaphysical questioning? It's funny because when the whole issue of Christian "Intelligent Design" came up I immediately thought of Nabokov and laughed. I've been quibbling with Nabokov's anti-evolutionary ideas every time I came across them for years now. How did Nabokov allow himself to be so certain that mimicry is far more elaborate than is necessary to trick a predator? When you eat stuff you're usually going to look pretty closely at it, I would imagine.
---------------------------------
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Sandy P. Klein
Sent: Friday, 18 July 2008 9:06 a.m.
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) ...
Complete article at the following URL:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/07/vladimir_nabokov_furious_darwi.html
Vladimir Nabokov, "Furious" Darwin Doubter So was Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) secretly a fundamentalist Christian, a mad man, or just plain ignorant? The great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) was, in his own telling, a "furious" critic of Darwinian theory. He based the judgment not on religion, to which biographer Brian Boyd writes that he was "profoundly indifferent," but on decades of his scientific study of butterflies, including at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History. Of course, this was all before the culture-wide sclerosis of Darwinian orthodoxy set in.
As Boyd notes in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, "He could not accept that the undirected randomness of natural selection would ever explain the elaborateness of nature's designs, especially in the most complex cases of mimicry where the design appears to exceed any predators powers of apprehension."
Boyd summarized the artist's scientific bona fides in an appreciation in Natural History. For most of the 1940s, he served as de facto curator of lepidoptera at Harvard Universitys Museum of Comparative Zoology, and became the authority on the little-studied blue butterflies (Polyommatini) of North and South America. He was also a pioneer in the study of butterflies' microscopic anatomy, distinguishing otherwise almost identical blues by differences in their genital parts.Later employed at Harvard as a research fellow in entomology while teaching comp lit at Wellesley, Nabokov published scientific journal articles in The Entomologist, The Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, The Lepidopterists' News, and Psyche: A Journal of Entomology.
[ ... ]
Comforting! But Singh misses the point of Nabokov's question. It's not the perfection of the pattern that needs an explanation. The novelist/lepidopterist asked, if a particular artistic subtlety in that perfection is beyond the ability of a predator to perceive, how did nature select it?
Posted by David Klinghoffer on July 17, 2008 8:14 AM
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/