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Fw: Boyd on Kurt Johnson on Mimicry K. Johnson addendum
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----- Original Message -----
From: Johnson, Kurt
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Cc: 'D. Barton Johnson' ; 'Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)' ; 'Dieter E. Zimmer'
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 11:51 AM
Subject: RE: Boyd on Kurt Johnson on Mimicry
PLEASE POST, out of fairness!
Well I got cheated here because my "post" that Dieter refers to was never posted at Nabokov Forum (only cc'd to him as a courtesy) and thus the PS is out of context. In the original I said that more cognitive activities were more likely in vertebrates (like birds [which, by the scientific literature, might comprise 20% of insect predation]), but less likely in invertebrates (which, by the scientific literature might comprise 80% of insect predation). I know there is quite a literature of cognitive-like behavior in vertebrates. So far, as far as I know, the invertebrate literature has only dealt with released behaviors, although, for instance, in something like a giant squid etc. (with an extremely complex nervous system, like the largest vertebrate-like eye in the world) such more complex behavior might be suggested.
KURT
Kurt Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: D. Barton Johnson [mailto:chtodel@cox.net]
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 2:07 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer and Kjurt Johnson on Mimicry
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:45 PM
Subject: RE: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry
Response to Dieter:
Ø Brian and I are so close on this (and much more) that perhaps we should not pursue it, especially as other readers seem to find it a great bore. Just one more remark which the bored guys and gals should by all means skip.
"Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. . . . It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati. . . . "
Yes, just look away if someone grappling gently with his own double seems too dull or grotesque.
Ø It is exactly because I know very well how thoroughly, profoundly and extensively Nabokov researched even minor matters he intended to use in his fiction that I was astonished by the paucity of his material on mimicry which to him was no minor matter.
Sometimes VN knew a subject so well that there's no evidence for his knowledge. The evidence of his "library" would suggest he didn't care that much for literature; but in fact, of course, it was stored in a library of the mind. Nabokov could have reconsulted a work there for fifty years without much external evidence to show for it: who would have known he was so deeply steeped in Chateaubriand (of course, we knew VN knew Chateaubriand was more than a kind of steak) if Chateaubriand hadn't been too relevant to the incest and suicide themes in ADA to leave him out of the Ardis library?
Ø --my additional guess--he may have felt that a closer study of the phenomenon would have forced the "two souls in his breast" (a quote from "Faust") to fight it out.
Elegant and attractive, but: VN's notes on mimicry from the 1940s, his laboratory years, don't sound hesitant; his comments on mimicry in SM date from 1947, at the peak of his scientific work; and his eagerness to spend 3 years working on a book on mimicry in the 1950s don't really suggest that he thought his ideas would be overturned by examining the scientific evidence.
Ø "Father's Butterflies," I suggest, was written at a very unpropitious moment when he didn't have access to the scientific libraries of Berlin he was used to, and those of America were still a year or two away.
Interesting point. I conjectured in the biography that "Father's Butterflies" was written in spring of 1939, simply because we don't otherwise know what he was writing then; if that's right, he COULD have used Paris's libraries and natural history museums, but clearly didn't (his Moulinet find, which seems to have fired his imagination to write "Father's Butterflies," was something he didn't inspect under a microscope, and write up, until he arrived in the US); but it's possible he wrote it in Frejus over the summer, where he certainly wouldn't have had access to information.
And, returning to a PS to the earlier September 4 note:
Ø As for Kurt Johnson's remark that a butterfly does not "decide" but just presents a "released behavior". Well, we all know anthropomorphic language is bad, but we all know also that it is irresistably attractive, so we all use it, sometimes even in peer-reviewed literature, and as long as we are aware that it is just a shorthand way of speaking about the absolutely unknown (the subjective experience of a living being other than oneself) I think it is all right, for it makes for better reading.
Here I would side with Dieter's first instincts even more strongly than with his reply to Kurt.
Kurt's stricture represents an older attitude. Frans de Waal amusingly reports that when working in a team with a new student to whom he suggested she look at reconciliation in apes, something he had been the first to notice (and now utterly uncontroversial), her home institution resisted: her "entire committee was convinced that such a thing as reconciliation could never exist in animals. . . . We figured that perhaps we could change their minds by inviting them to the Arnhem Zoo, where the chimpanzees lived: seeing apes close up might be an eye-opener. To this proposal, however, they replied: . . . 'What good would it do to see the animals? It will be much easier to stay objective if we are not influenced by that.' " (The Ape and the Sushi Master, 2001, from a chapter "The Whole Animal: Cultural Talismans and Excessive Fear of Anthropomorphism.")
Donald Griffin, the discoverer of bat sonar (again utterly disbelieved at first: how could bats have something humans had just invented?), argues persuasively that the onus is on those who would deny minds to animals (see his The Question of Animal Awareness, or his Animal Minds).
Humans were once thought distinguishable as the tool-using animal; other animals were discovered to use tools. Humans were redefined as tool-making animals; other animals were discovered to make tools. Humans were re-redefined as the animals with culture; other animals were found to have culture.
If Kurt wishes to claim that only humans can decide, or that it's safer to assume automatism rather than cognition in animals, he has a hard task on his hands, given the ethological and neurological evidence of the last 30 years. VN would be inclined side with him ("the difference between an ape's memory and a human's is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum Library," or words to that effect), but the evidence seems to point the other way. Here I think Tolstoy was closer to the truth-not that I suppose butterflies think at anything like the level his dogs or horses do. But if even birds can make tools and have culture, it would seem surprising that insects can't ever decide.
----- Original Message -----
From: Johnson, Kurt
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Cc: 'D. Barton Johnson' ; 'Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)' ; 'Dieter E. Zimmer'
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 11:51 AM
Subject: RE: Boyd on Kurt Johnson on Mimicry
PLEASE POST, out of fairness!
Well I got cheated here because my "post" that Dieter refers to was never posted at Nabokov Forum (only cc'd to him as a courtesy) and thus the PS is out of context. In the original I said that more cognitive activities were more likely in vertebrates (like birds [which, by the scientific literature, might comprise 20% of insect predation]), but less likely in invertebrates (which, by the scientific literature might comprise 80% of insect predation). I know there is quite a literature of cognitive-like behavior in vertebrates. So far, as far as I know, the invertebrate literature has only dealt with released behaviors, although, for instance, in something like a giant squid etc. (with an extremely complex nervous system, like the largest vertebrate-like eye in the world) such more complex behavior might be suggested.
KURT
Kurt Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: D. Barton Johnson [mailto:chtodel@cox.net]
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 2:07 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer and Kjurt Johnson on Mimicry
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)
To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:45 PM
Subject: RE: Fw: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry
Response to Dieter:
Ø Brian and I are so close on this (and much more) that perhaps we should not pursue it, especially as other readers seem to find it a great bore. Just one more remark which the bored guys and gals should by all means skip.
"Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. . . . It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati. . . . "
Yes, just look away if someone grappling gently with his own double seems too dull or grotesque.
Ø It is exactly because I know very well how thoroughly, profoundly and extensively Nabokov researched even minor matters he intended to use in his fiction that I was astonished by the paucity of his material on mimicry which to him was no minor matter.
Sometimes VN knew a subject so well that there's no evidence for his knowledge. The evidence of his "library" would suggest he didn't care that much for literature; but in fact, of course, it was stored in a library of the mind. Nabokov could have reconsulted a work there for fifty years without much external evidence to show for it: who would have known he was so deeply steeped in Chateaubriand (of course, we knew VN knew Chateaubriand was more than a kind of steak) if Chateaubriand hadn't been too relevant to the incest and suicide themes in ADA to leave him out of the Ardis library?
Ø --my additional guess--he may have felt that a closer study of the phenomenon would have forced the "two souls in his breast" (a quote from "Faust") to fight it out.
Elegant and attractive, but: VN's notes on mimicry from the 1940s, his laboratory years, don't sound hesitant; his comments on mimicry in SM date from 1947, at the peak of his scientific work; and his eagerness to spend 3 years working on a book on mimicry in the 1950s don't really suggest that he thought his ideas would be overturned by examining the scientific evidence.
Ø "Father's Butterflies," I suggest, was written at a very unpropitious moment when he didn't have access to the scientific libraries of Berlin he was used to, and those of America were still a year or two away.
Interesting point. I conjectured in the biography that "Father's Butterflies" was written in spring of 1939, simply because we don't otherwise know what he was writing then; if that's right, he COULD have used Paris's libraries and natural history museums, but clearly didn't (his Moulinet find, which seems to have fired his imagination to write "Father's Butterflies," was something he didn't inspect under a microscope, and write up, until he arrived in the US); but it's possible he wrote it in Frejus over the summer, where he certainly wouldn't have had access to information.
And, returning to a PS to the earlier September 4 note:
Ø As for Kurt Johnson's remark that a butterfly does not "decide" but just presents a "released behavior". Well, we all know anthropomorphic language is bad, but we all know also that it is irresistably attractive, so we all use it, sometimes even in peer-reviewed literature, and as long as we are aware that it is just a shorthand way of speaking about the absolutely unknown (the subjective experience of a living being other than oneself) I think it is all right, for it makes for better reading.
Here I would side with Dieter's first instincts even more strongly than with his reply to Kurt.
Kurt's stricture represents an older attitude. Frans de Waal amusingly reports that when working in a team with a new student to whom he suggested she look at reconciliation in apes, something he had been the first to notice (and now utterly uncontroversial), her home institution resisted: her "entire committee was convinced that such a thing as reconciliation could never exist in animals. . . . We figured that perhaps we could change their minds by inviting them to the Arnhem Zoo, where the chimpanzees lived: seeing apes close up might be an eye-opener. To this proposal, however, they replied: . . . 'What good would it do to see the animals? It will be much easier to stay objective if we are not influenced by that.' " (The Ape and the Sushi Master, 2001, from a chapter "The Whole Animal: Cultural Talismans and Excessive Fear of Anthropomorphism.")
Donald Griffin, the discoverer of bat sonar (again utterly disbelieved at first: how could bats have something humans had just invented?), argues persuasively that the onus is on those who would deny minds to animals (see his The Question of Animal Awareness, or his Animal Minds).
Humans were once thought distinguishable as the tool-using animal; other animals were discovered to use tools. Humans were redefined as tool-making animals; other animals were discovered to make tools. Humans were re-redefined as the animals with culture; other animals were found to have culture.
If Kurt wishes to claim that only humans can decide, or that it's safer to assume automatism rather than cognition in animals, he has a hard task on his hands, given the ethological and neurological evidence of the last 30 years. VN would be inclined side with him ("the difference between an ape's memory and a human's is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum Library," or words to that effect), but the evidence seems to point the other way. Here I think Tolstoy was closer to the truth-not that I suppose butterflies think at anything like the level his dogs or horses do. But if even birds can make tools and have culture, it would seem surprising that insects can't ever decide.