Non-fiction: Nabokov's butterflies
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of " Lolita". But Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the zoology museum at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the US. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of a group known as the Polyommatus blues (see pic). He envisioned them coming to the New World (the Americas) from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
It wasn't until 1990 that Dr Naomi Pierce of Harvard and her team of scientists began to look at his ideas seriously. To do so, she needed the DNA of the butterflies to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of the 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.
Pierce and her colleagues found 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 ( Europe, Asia and Africa) butterflies than to their neighbours. They concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the Americas just as Nabokov had speculated.
"By God, he got every one right," Pierce says, citing one of Nabokov's most famous poems, 'On Discovering a Butterfly': 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 was the curator of lepidoptera at the zoology museum at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the US. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of a group known as the Polyommatus blues (see pic). He envisioned them coming to the New World (the Americas) from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
It wasn't until 1990 that Dr Naomi Pierce of Harvard and her team of scientists began to look at his ideas seriously. To do so, she needed the DNA of the butterflies to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of the 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.
Pierce and her colleagues found 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 ( Europe, Asia and Africa) butterflies than to their neighbours. They concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the Americas just as Nabokov had speculated.
"By God, he got every one right," Pierce says, citing one of Nabokov's most famous poems, 'On Discovering a Butterfly': 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.
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