[Pollinator] NYTimes.com: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated

[Jennifer Tsang]

Thanks to Doug Holy for forwarding the below article:








 <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times



SCIENCE   | February 01, 2011 
 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?emc=eta1>
Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated 
By CARL ZIMMER 
Vladimir Nabokov studied butterflies, and he came up with a sweeping
hypothesis that, 65 years later, DNA analysis has proven correct. 


Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated


By CARL ZIMMER
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CARL%20ZIMMER&fdq=199601
01&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CARL%20ZIMMER&inline=nyt-per> 


 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/vladimir_nabok
ov/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people
as the author of classic novels like "Lolita" and "Pale Fire." But even as
he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a
self-taught expert on butterflies. 

He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard <http://www.mcz.harvard.edu/>  University, and he collected the
insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of
hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a
sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group
known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World
from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves. 

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov's
lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific
reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has
been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how
Polyommatus blues evolved. Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society
of London, they reported
<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/01/22/rspb.2010.2
213>  that Nabokov was absolutely right. 

"It's really quite a marvel," said Naomi Pierce of Harvard
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard
_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , a co-author of the paper. 

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his
father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political
activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a
gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and
carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific
journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian
Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he
might have become a full-time lepidopterist. 

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He
used the proceeds of his second novel, "King, Queen, Knave," to finance an
expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted more than a
hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in
1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his
greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into
the science of butterflies. 

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species
called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classifying
the butterflies, based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that
what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly
related. 

At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved.
He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait and
headed south all the way to Chile. 

Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to
imagine "a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine." Going back
millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the
butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see
five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World. 

Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia
to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound
far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge
spanning the Pacific. "I find it easier to give a friendly little push to
some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome
rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the
world," he wrote. 

When "Lolita" made Nabokov a star in 1958, journalists were delighted to
discover his hidden life as a butterfly expert. A famous photograph of
Nabokov that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post when he was 66 is from a
butterfly's perspective. The looming Russian author swings a net with rapt
concentration. But despite the fact that he was the best-known butterfly
expert of his day and a Harvard museum curator, other lepidopterists
considered Nabokov a dutiful but undistinguished researcher. He could
describe details well, they granted, but did not produce scientifically
important ideas. 

Nabokov's reputation as a scientist languished until the 1990s. Kurt
Johnson, an entomologist then at the American Museum
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/america
n_museum_of_natural_history/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  of Natural History,
examined the genitals of the blues and was surprised at their diversity.
Searching the literature for help, he came across Nabokov's work. As he
later described in the 2000 book "Nabokov's Blues," written with Steve
Coates, Dr. Johnson set about reviving Nabokov's classification. Working
with Zsolt Balint of the Hungarian Museum of Natural History and Dubi
Benyamini, an Israeli collector, he collected new blues and carefully
examined them. In the end, they decided Nabokov was right in his
classification. Along the way, they even named some new species in his
honor, like Nabokovia cuzquenha. 

More recently, scientists have begun applying new DNA sequencing techniques
to Nabokov's work. In 1944, for example, Nabokov published the first
description of the Karner blue butterfly, a rare form that lives in the
northeastern United States. Judging from its color and choice of plants to
eat, Nabokov came to believe that it was a distinct species. But when
scientists began to analyze its genes, they decided it was just part of an
existing species, the Melissa blue (Lycaeides melissa). 

Chris Nice of Texas State University and his colleagues recently used
next-generation sequencing to get a far more detailed look at the DNA of
Karner blues and their relatives. They found that Karner blues and Melissa
blues actually trade very few genes. In their December 2010 report in
Biology Letters
<http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/21/rsbl.2010.1
077.abstract> , they declare that Karner blues are a separate species after
all - and Nabokov gets credit for recognizing it. 

Dr. Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of
lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov's work while preparing
an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. Reading "Nabokov's
Blues," she was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. "It
was an amazing, bold hypothesis," she said. "And I thought, 'Oh, my God, we
could test this.' " 

To do so, she would need to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of blues and
estimate when the branches split. It would have been impossible for Nabokov
to do such a study on the anatomy of butterflies alone. Dr. Pierce would
need their DNA, which could provide more detail about their evolutionary
history. While she had already gathered some butterfly sequences, she would
need many more. 

Dr. Pierce began to collaborate with Dr. Johnson and his colleagues, who
arranged for specimens to be sent to her lab and offered their hard-won
knowledge of the diversity of the blues. Dr. Pierce's postdoctoral
researcher, Roger Vila, traveled to the Andes to collect more butterflies
and then sequenced their DNA back at Harvard. 

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues used a computer to calculate the most likely
relationships among the butterflies. They also compared the number of
mutations each species had acquired to determine how long ago they had
diverged from one another. 

There were several plausible hypotheses for how the butterflies might have
evolved. They might have evolved in the Amazon, as the rising Andes
fragments their populations. If that were true, the species would be closely
related to one another. 

But that is not what Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found. Instead, they
found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about
10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related
to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her
colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the
New World - just as Nabokov had speculated. 

"By God, he got every one right," Dr. Pierce said. "I couldn't get over it -
I was blown away." 

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov's idea that the
butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait
was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily
ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of
Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range
that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that
came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the
falling temperatures. 

Nabokov's taxonomic horseshoes turn out to belong in Nome after all. 

"What a great paper," said James Mallet, an expert on butterfly evolution at
University College London. "It's a fitting tribute to the great man to see
that the most modern methods that technology can deliver now largely support
his systematic arrangement." 

Dr. Pierce says she believes Nabokov would have been greatly pleased to be
so vindicated, and points to one of his most famous poems, "On Discovering a
Butterfly." The 1943 poem begins: 

I found it and I named it, being versed 

in taxonomic Latin; thus became 

godfather to an insect and its first 

describer - and I want no other fame. 

"He felt that his scientific work was standing for all time, and that he was
just a player in a much bigger enterprise," Dr. Pierce said. "He was not
known as a scientist, but this certainly indicates to me that he knew what
it's all about." 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 26, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the year Vladimir Nabokov
immigrated to the United States. It was 1940, not 1941.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2011

An earlier version of this article omitted the name of an author, with Kurt
Johnson, of the 2000 book "Nabokov's Blues." He is Steve Coates.

 

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