Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0016781, Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:43:46 +0100

Subject
Re: great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) ...
Date
Body
This debate is increasingly confusing! Let's note once again that the PREY
deceives while the PREDATOR strives to avoid being deceived. Getting things
wrong is bad for both sides. Note, predators are often also prey as you move
up the food chain. Learning to eat without being eaten is a constant force
in Natural Selection.

At various times even devout Darwinians (even Darwin?) look in awe at
Nature's diversity and wonder "How and why?" Natural Selection, with all its
outstanding technical problems (e.g., step ONE, the first self-replicator!),
does seem the least-imperfect answer once one accepts the billions of years
available for small changes to accumulate. If you're a Young Earther, of
course, in spite of the evidence, it's rather difficult to accept any
gradual emergence of species -- and answers are sought in the Word'a'God
(pick a God, choose a Word). Many Religionists have a problem understanding
the Scientific Method: they see modifications in theories and disagreements
between scientists as sure signs of failure. Yet these have proved to be a
source of strength and increased understanding compared with faith-based
dogma. Scientists are quite free to be theists, agnostics, or atheists
without disturbing their basic belief in the idea of a rational (but humanly
fallible and disputatious) pursuit of Nature via observation and experiment,
theory-building and theory-dismantling.

I'm inclined, on the basis of scattered evidence, to place VN on the right
side (MY side!) of this ill-defined dichotomy of "world-views." There'll be
days when we look in amaze at a trompe-l'oeil water-blob etched on a
butterfly's wing. So, we can't explain that in a naive mechanical
cause-effect appeal to Natural Selection. Does that perfect water-blob,
perfect to the point of appearing to have the correct refractive index!,
improve the insect's survival or mating propensities? God knows! Who said
that? Seriously, such advantages, if any, can conceivably be tested. As with
JA's cute example (the brighter predator scans her putative meal with care),
one assumes that mating involves shaggability factors beyond our ken.
Speaking of Man as predator, the counter-productive irony is that the
water-blobbed wing might prove irresistible to VN's net. Which reminds me
that last week's Sunday Times CULTURE supplement carried a fetching
frontpage photo of VN in full lepidopterist hunting attire.

Here's a 1976 experiment proving in the most direct way the impact of
mimicry: how to look edible or inedible. Did VN see this before he died
(1977)?

Science 18 February 1977:
Vol. 195. no. 4279, pp. 681 - 683
DOI: 10.1126/science.195.4279.681
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
ARTICLES
Batesian Mimicry: Selective Advantage of Color Pattern
J. G. STERNBURG 1, G. P. WALDBAUER 1, and M. R. JEFFORDS 1
1 Department of Entomology, University of Illinois, Urbana 61801

Field studies of releases and recaptures of diurnal moths painted with
yellow to resemble the edible tiger swallowtail and of black moths that
resemble a toxic species of swallowtail produced these results: (i) A
greater proportion of the black moths were recaptured; (ii) daily trapping
for a week after each release showed that the black moths survived longer
than the yellow-painted moths; (iii) an analysis of wing injuries shows that
most attacks can be attributed to birds and that the yellow-painted moths
were attacked more often, more vigorously, or more persistently than the
black moths. These results are interpreted as showing a greater predation
pressure on the yellow-painted than on the black moths and, therefore, as
confirming the Batesian theory of mimicry.

Submitted on August 11, 1976
Revised on October 26, 1976

Stan Kelly-Bootle


On 18/07/2008 05:05, "joseph Aisenberg" <vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET> wrote:

>> 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) ...
>>
>> <http://www.evolutionnews.org/>
>>
>> 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
>> <http://www.amazon.com/Vladimir-Nabokov-American-Brian-Boyd/dp/069106797X/ref
>> =sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216187638&sr=1-4> 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 predator¹s powers of
>> apprehension."
>> Boyd summarized the artist's scientific bona fides
>> <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_6_108/ai_55127882/print?tag=a
>> rtBody;col1> in an appreciation in Natural History.
>>> For most of the 1940s, he served as de facto curator of lepidoptera at
>>> Harvard University¹s 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


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