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Nabokov vindicated--and how!
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Dear Nabokovians,
Here is a New York Times report on a paper just published today that confirms Nabokov's hypothesis about the colonization of the Americas by the Blues, in his most important paper, the 1945 "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae," his First Revision of the group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
News of the paper, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was embargoed until 6pm Jan 26 EST.
The driving force behind the work was Naomi Pierce of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Nabokov's old workplace. She herself had assumed Nabokov was not much better than a gifted amateur when she began preparing an MCZ exhibition for his centenary in 1999, but quickly came to understand the quality and significance of his work, not least through the appreciation of Kurt Johnson, Zsolt Balint and Dubi Benyamini for his pioneer paper on neotropical (Latin American) Blues. On the strength of the very meagre number of specimens he had at his disposal during wartime, he was able to work out taxonomic divisions that seemed radical at the time but have been completely vindicated by the work of Johnson et al.
More startlingly, from that meagre available evidence Nabokov hypothesized that the Blues in the Americas may have evolved from ancestors arriving from Asia across the Bering Strait, in five successive waves (he specified which groups came in which waves). Naomi Pierce realized the hypothesis could be tested, and she and her team drew together data from Old and New World Blues, especially DNA, and from host plants, and climate records. Nabokov's hunch was exactly right: "Our results show that Nabokov's inferences based on morphological characters (primarily of the male genitalia) were uncannily correct in delineating not only species relationships but also the historical ordering of these key five events in the evolution of New World blues." (p. 4)
As Kurt Johnson (one of the authors of the paper, along with Zsolt Balint, Dubi Benyamini and Naomi Pierce and six others, including lead author Roger Vila) commented to me that the results were
"contrary to the rather arrogant comments made by a few reviewers of Nabokov's Blues . . . that this was not "big science" and only made a big deal of because of Nabokov's standing in literature is simply not true. This new paper says directly, and backs it up with the DNA evidence, that Nabokov's contribution was significant, historic, and displayed remarkable, uncanny biological intuition."
This kind of biogeographical work has, if I understand correctly, never been done before on invertebrates, among which butterflies are arguably best known, and the blues "among the largest and most systematically challenging tribes within the family Lycaenidae (the blues, coppers and hairstreaks. . . . With more than 400 species, the cosmopolitan Polyommatus section (equivalent to 'Plebejinae' in older classifications) is the most diverse of these." (p. 1)
All the more kudos to Nabokov, then, for having developed a hypothesis over sixty years ago, in such a complex group, that proved fertile in driving a ground-breaking research project that uses methods (DNA sampling, computer-assisted cladistics) neither he nor anyone else could have imagined in 1945.
And the paper in itself is beautiful for its clarity of focus and range of method.
Brian Boyd
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Here is a New York Times report on a paper just published today that confirms Nabokov's hypothesis about the colonization of the Americas by the Blues, in his most important paper, the 1945 "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae," his First Revision of the group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
News of the paper, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was embargoed until 6pm Jan 26 EST.
The driving force behind the work was Naomi Pierce of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Nabokov's old workplace. She herself had assumed Nabokov was not much better than a gifted amateur when she began preparing an MCZ exhibition for his centenary in 1999, but quickly came to understand the quality and significance of his work, not least through the appreciation of Kurt Johnson, Zsolt Balint and Dubi Benyamini for his pioneer paper on neotropical (Latin American) Blues. On the strength of the very meagre number of specimens he had at his disposal during wartime, he was able to work out taxonomic divisions that seemed radical at the time but have been completely vindicated by the work of Johnson et al.
More startlingly, from that meagre available evidence Nabokov hypothesized that the Blues in the Americas may have evolved from ancestors arriving from Asia across the Bering Strait, in five successive waves (he specified which groups came in which waves). Naomi Pierce realized the hypothesis could be tested, and she and her team drew together data from Old and New World Blues, especially DNA, and from host plants, and climate records. Nabokov's hunch was exactly right: "Our results show that Nabokov's inferences based on morphological characters (primarily of the male genitalia) were uncannily correct in delineating not only species relationships but also the historical ordering of these key five events in the evolution of New World blues." (p. 4)
As Kurt Johnson (one of the authors of the paper, along with Zsolt Balint, Dubi Benyamini and Naomi Pierce and six others, including lead author Roger Vila) commented to me that the results were
"contrary to the rather arrogant comments made by a few reviewers of Nabokov's Blues . . . that this was not "big science" and only made a big deal of because of Nabokov's standing in literature is simply not true. This new paper says directly, and backs it up with the DNA evidence, that Nabokov's contribution was significant, historic, and displayed remarkable, uncanny biological intuition."
This kind of biogeographical work has, if I understand correctly, never been done before on invertebrates, among which butterflies are arguably best known, and the blues "among the largest and most systematically challenging tribes within the family Lycaenidae (the blues, coppers and hairstreaks. . . . With more than 400 species, the cosmopolitan Polyommatus section (equivalent to 'Plebejinae' in older classifications) is the most diverse of these." (p. 1)
All the more kudos to Nabokov, then, for having developed a hypothesis over sixty years ago, in such a complex group, that proved fertile in driving a ground-breaking research project that uses methods (DNA sampling, computer-assisted cladistics) neither he nor anyone else could have imagined in 1945.
And the paper in itself is beautiful for its clarity of focus and range of method.
Brian Boyd
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/