Nabokov and evolution

[mmcirvin]

The new Seed blog has a post describing Vladimir Nabokov as an Intelligent Design proponent.

From what I've read about Nabokov's scientific work (mostly in admiring essays by Stephen Jay Gould, so it may well be that I'm missing other perspectives), I think this is a historical error. They're fitting old controversies into modern political categories.

ID as we know it is a modern outgrowth of the religious creationist movement. Nabokov belongs instead to an early-to-mid-20th-century naturalist tradition of skepticism of natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolution. He wasn't bucking science at all; it was a mainstream opinion, or at least a widespread gut feeling, in many fields that there just had to be something more teleological going on.

Today we tend to think of scientific progress in terms of revolutions that instantaneously change everything from an old view to a modern one, but I get a definite impression that it took almost a century before what is now called "the neo-Darwinian synthesis" was the accepted picture of how evolution worked in every subfield of biology. It took lots of new information about genetics and development to get there, and given the extraordinary, sweeping nature of Darwin's explanation, that is probably how it should have been.

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I don't know dates or details, but I believe that, approximately, what happened was:
1859: Darwin published "Origin of Species"/Wallace published "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type"
1860s through 1900-ish: Evolution through natural selection widely accepted
1920-ish: Natural selection began to fall out of favour, with the emphasis being on fortuitous macromutations
1940-ish: Goldschmidt's "Hopeful Monsters" theory
1950-ish: Neo-Darwinian synthesis brings natural selection back into favour

Creationists often claim that Darin was accepted mindlessly or uncritically, whereas in fact natural selection has weathered a lot of scientific criticism, and survived because it's the best match with observations.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And from what I've read, there was a lot of confusion as to whether the "hopeful monster" notion did or did not fit well into the Darwinian paradigm. Certainly Darwin was more of an extreme gradualist than most biologists are today, but on the other hand, a modern evo-devo type would probably include anything you can explain with the established genetic and developmental mechanisms as fitting into the neo-Darwinian picture. (Though Lynn Margulis, if I recall correctly, regards all the crazy stuff that bacteria do as too different to be honestly called Darwinian. It turns into arguments over words.)

It all just increases my astonishment that Darwin and Wallace were able to take it as far as they did with no clue about modern genetics.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

And another 1930s-50s slump where Darwinism had a distinct tinge of eugenics/Nazism, which was a big problem for Konrad Lorenz, among others.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And, of course, in the above I should also mention mechanisms operating in parallel such as sexual selection, genetic drift, etc.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

The use of the word 'Darwinism' to indicate the general idea that the current diversity of life is due to unintelligent processes of mutation, natural selection, and various population effects is one of my lasting pet peeves. It's like if I called all modern day Christians Zoroastrians, because you know, same intellectual heritage.