No need to correct Victor Fet's detailed and accurate contribution!
I think Kurt Johnson said it well, in his Harvard ALA paper and maybe
also with Steve Coates in Nabokov's Blues, when he suggested
that Nabokov could have come to accept all of the recent advances in
evolutionary theory without sacrificing much, or any, of his magical
view of the world. VN made many statements that demonstrate his
acceptance of evolution and even of natural selection. For a while he
was interested in the concept of non-utilitarian mimicry, but he did
not take it very far scientifically. Most likely, as far as I can
judge, he felt that there were other fundamental forces at play in the
evolution of nature in addition to natural selection. There are hints
of his interest in this level of things in his scientific papers, but I
would not call it "metaphysical"--although at some level, it must be,
since all questions of being are ultimately metaphysical. It looks as
though in his large studies of blue butterflies he may have been
anticipating such areas as complexity theory, and emergence (as
Victoria Alexander has suggested). At a recent conference I argued
that this "holistic" scientific practice puts Nabokov in the company of
Goethe, whose approach to nature and to the accumulation of empirical
data was similar.
By the way--I may have mentioned this before--but to a Tennessee
resident it is quite amusing to read all the attention devoted to the
1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn in Berlin's Russian daily, Rul'.
The trial occasioned a variety of lectures and editorials, and emigre
theologists spoke out in favor of evolution.
Stephen Blackwell