I would reply to the Discovery Institute were it really interested in open debate and facts rather than a priori convictions that (as I have pointed out elsewhere) Nabokov's assumption that mimicry exceeds predators' powers of deception has been falsified.
Brian Boyd
Well, that's what some neo-Darwinists say, but it's not exactly true. See below an excerpt from my article on Nabokov's views on Darwinism below. I cite studies that support Nabokov. HOWEVER, the Discovery Institute article is extremely misleading. Nabokov's views support a branch of research known as neutral evolutionary theory, which supplements but does not overturn the theory of natural selection. Nabokov believed in natural selection (I cite proof of this in my paper). He just thought (and, I argue, he was right) there were other mechanisms at work in the production of mimicry.
Victoria
"Neutral Evolution and Aesthetics: Vladimir Nabokov and Insect Mimicry," Working Papers Series 01-10-057 (Santa Fe: Santa Fe Institute, 2001).
"Nabokov, Teleology, and Insect Mimicry," Nabokov Studies 7 (2003).
According to Batesian mimicry, the fact that the viceroy looks like the
unpalatable monarch makes it less likely to be preyed on by birds that have sampled
monarchs. Therefore, a resemblance might be reproductively advantageous to
viceroy butterflies as they would be preferentially selected. Nabokov tasted both the
viceroy and monarch himself and reported that they both were unpalatable
(Nabokov's Butterflies 535). Credulous Darwinists continued to believe the Batesian
mimicry story without testing it themselves. Finally years later, a study by Lincoln
Brower and David Ritland (using birds to do the taste test) found that indeed the
viceroy is also "bitter," and they concluded that "the viceroy butterfly is not a Batesian
mimic" (497). After Brower and Ritland discredited the Batesian theory as an
explanation for the viceroy-monarch relation, the Müllerian theory of mimicry took its
place.[18] According to this theory, different species of butterflies, each unpalatable,
mutually reinforce the association between appearance and bitter taste. But as R. I.
Vane-Wright notes, "Because, in addition to sharing the same warning signal, all
members of a Müllerian group are well-protected, it has been argued that no
deception is involved and, therefore, they are not really mimics at all" (460).
There is more to this mimicry mystery. A 1984 study by J. R. G. Turner provides
some support for Nabokov's argument (in "Father's Butterflies," see below)
that natural selection may not have gradually and painstakingly shaped
resemblances between different species of butterflies, such as the viceroy and
monarch. Turner concludes that Müllerian mimics and their models have not traveled
long and unique pathways. Turner shows that because butterflies share a common
toolbox (e.g., laws guiding reaction-diffusion processes) for forming patterns, a single
mutation leads to a large change in appearance, bringing one species reasonably
close to another. Turner's findings are consistent with Nabokov's view of pattern
formation. Nabokov supposed that the resemblance between similar species was the
product of similar mechanistic, temporal, or chemical constraints. Nabokov never
denied that functionality might help stabilize the resemblance between "mimics" once
it is already in existence, but the initial cause of the resemblance must be sought in
some ahistorical limiting principles, such as the ground plan constraints, which have
nothing to do with survival or increased reproduction. One can still argue against
Brower, Ritland, Van-Wright, and Turner if one likes (as Boyd insists, Nabokov's
"position [on mimicry] has proved to be wrong"), but there is no denying that
Nabokov's comments against viceroy-monarch mimicry receive compelling support
from these scientists.
I would reply to the Discovery Institute were it really interested in open debate and facts rather than a priori convictions that (as I have pointed out elsewhere) Nabokov's assumption that mimicry exceeds predators' powers of deception has been falsified.
Brian Boyd
Complete article at the following URL: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/07/vladimir_nabokov_furious_darwi.html 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 predator’s 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 University’s 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?
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.