Nabokov and Science.

Nabokov, Brian Boyd tells us (Stalking Nabokov, Columbia University Press, 2011), was a scientist. I do not think so. Nabokov rejects evolution by natural (and sexual, and kin) selection, which is what any student of biology knows make sense in nature. As in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, here years before in his life, in chapter 2 of The Gift, Nabokov the artist tells us what the father of the protagonist told him about butterflies:

He told me about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise, which was not explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolutionʼs unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators, feathered, scaled or otherwise (not very fastidious, but then not too fond of butterflies), and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man (a hypothesis that may lead far an evolutionist who observes apes feeding on butterflies) (Vintage International Edition, p. 110).

We can select some of the words above to understand what is the theoretical basis of the argument against evolution the protagonist presents. The words are: “incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise … too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators … seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man”. As we can see, the argument is the old argument from ignorance or incredulity. This argument is weak, as Richard Dawkins shows in The Blind Watchmaker (Penguin Books, 1986). Nabokov then talks about the argument of incredulity arrived from complexity. Dawkins writes about it (p. 39):

There are more serious versions of the argument from personal incredulity, versions which do not rest simply upon ignorance or lack of ingenuity. One form of the argument makes direct use of the extreme sense of wonder which we all feel when confronted with highly complicated machinery, like the detailed perfection of the echolocation equipment of bats. The implication is that it is somehow self-evident that anything so wonderful as this could not possibly have evolved by natural selection.

The argument of incredulity before complexity is too, as Dawkins shows, the argument of incredulity. What many humans cannot grasp is the huge, vastly huge, grotesquely immense huge amount of time that it takes for that complexity to come. Any scientist who rejects a theory is not forced to propose an alternative theory; if the theory is falsified, then that is that. But Nabokov offered his theory here anyway, which is: that those butterfliesʼs colours have “been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man”. In other words, nature created those colours to make us understand that nature is an artist. Coming from an artist himself, Nabokov is saying that nature is the greatest artist of those “mirages where nature, that exquisite cheat, achieved absolute miracles” (p. 120). As a scientific explanation, Nabokovʼs theory is metaphysical, and even puerile. How butterflies could reproduce and perpetuate their kind if their colours were only an adaptation for another speciesʼs gratification (us) violate any common sense in biology. Yes, it could be exquisite to see the cheat, but it is for a natural purpose, and for the butterfliesʼ own advantage. Mimesis is an adaptation for survival, for the speciesʼs survival, not for another speciesʼ sense of wonder.

Nabokov was a great artist, but not a great scientist. He even ignored Charles Darwinʼs theory of sexual selection, which explains very well the excessive, exquisite profussion of colours in peacok tails. That this is so is very well shown by what Brian Boyd implies himself but cannot tell clearly to the reader (Ibid., p. 79):

Sometime in 1939, it seems, Nabokov wrote a long appendix to The Gift. Here Fyodor recounts his own early love for Lepidoptera and expounds his fatherʼs incisive but cryptic ideas on speciation and evolution, supposedly noted down in outline on the eve of his departure for his final expedition. This appendix, translated from the Russian by Dimitri Nabokov and published for the first time in any language in Nabokovʼs Butterflies, is, with the exception of The Enchanter—also a fifty-page typescript, also written in 1939, and also left unpublished in the authorʼs lifetime—the longest piece of Nabokov fiction to appear between his death and the publication of The Original of Laura in 2009. Here Nabokovʼs art, science, and metaphysics meet more unguardedly than anywhere else. Perhaps he did not publish it at the time because his other plans for continuing or expanding The Gift were never realized after the outbreak of the Second World War and his shift from Europe to America and from Russian to English. But perhaps, too, he had misgivings about mixing hard science with the kind of free speculation he had allowed himself from behind the mask of the Godunovs, father and son.

The second hypothesis is the more “natural”.