Former Post by JM: “I recently read news about how the skin of the octopus reacts to light like the eye; also how lizzards chemically respond to the substances of the ground…These findings made me question V.Nabokov’s ideas about “intelligent design” and “the marvelous coincidence of imitative aspect…far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.” (Speak, Memory)* –

Jansy Mello: In VN’s comments about mimicry in S,M (and elsewhere), he doesn’t refer to himself as a predator but rather as an “experimenter,” one that is attracted by “artistic perfection” exercising a “sublime curiosity”**, nor does he mention the extreme dangers of beauty to its bearer! Fortunately it seems that for mimicry to develop a living organism, not a dead specimen, is fundamental.   

Although I couldn’t find the news I was looking for related to lizards and mimetic behavior, namely how, independently from eye and brain input, their skin uses biochemical information to blend in with the environment using color responses to reproduce spotted, wet or grainy surroundings, I did find the one related to cephalopods:

 “Skulking around in the murky depths of the ocean means you need eyesight that's as good as it possibly can be, and scientists have discovered that the octopus has a great trick to visualise its surroundings. New research indicates that the creature's skin contains the same pigment proteins found in its eyes, so it responds to light and can help it 'see' what's nearby.University of California evolutionary biologists Desmond Ramirez and Todd Oakley have published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology, building on previous theories that had been put forward but never properly verified.[…] These deep-sea cephalopods are well known for changing colour to match their surroundings, thus evading predators and sneaking up on food sources. What the new findings prove is that the octopus' skin isn't just responding to instructions from the brain and eyes - it's actually reacting to light and changing colour itself…” http://www.sciencealert.com/octopuses-are-able-to-see-with-their-skin-new-research-says . What interested me most was the information that emphasized protective imitation as a result of automatic responses that are independent from what the animal registers or perceives of the world.

These recent scientific studies suggest that most protective patterns in the animals under investigation have arisen instantaneously, being unrelated to any kind of “vision” or definite intrinsic patterns (more data about that is still pending). It is impossible not to be surprised by VN’s elaborations: “the development of human ratiocination, in both the individual and historic senses, is extraordinarily linked to nature, the spirit of nature considered as the aggregate of all its manifestations, and all the modifications of them conditioned by time. How is it conceivable, in fact, that amid the huge jumble containing the embryos of countless organs[…], the magnificent chaos of nature never included thought?[ …] Human intelligence, with all its limitations and rights, inasmuch as it is a gift of nature, and a perpetually repeated one, cannot fail to exist in the warehouse of the bestower. It may, in that dark storehouse, differ from its species seen in sunlight as a marble god is distinct from the convolutions of the sculptor’s brain — but still it exists. Certain whims of nature can be, if not appreciated, at least merely noticed only by a brain that has developed in a related manner, and the sense of these whims can only be that — like a code or a family joke — they are accessible only to the illuminated, i.e., human, mind, and have no other mission than to give it pleasure — we are speaking of the fantastic refinement of "protective mimicry," which, in a world lacking an appointed observer endowed with artistic sensitivity, imagination, and humor, would simply be useless […] This fact, even taken alone, implies a silent, subtle, charmingly sly conspiracy between nature and the one who alone can understand, who alone has at last achieved this comprehension — a spiritual alliance concluded above and beyond all the seething, the stirring, the darkness of roaming reveilles, behind the back of all the world’s organic life.” [Father’s Butterflies - “The Atlantic Monthly” April 2000, Volume 285 No. 4], but the truly amazing considerations relate to what I’d considered just a random process of protective disguise:  “Obviously one cannot number among such approximations the ability of a certain caterpillar to assume, impromptu, the color of a plant or a net with which the experimenter has surrounded it. Perfection of color tonality is attained immediately. At the same time, this does not represent a "new" manifestation of protective coloration occurring before our eyes, but rather a play of the same nature-inspired possibilities inherent in the object under investigation, and withholding its secret from forced demonstration. Thus, not only the "aimlessness" of the accomplishment (the "aimlessness" of pure art), but also the absence of transitional forms, the ultimate clarity of observed phenomena, arouses strong doubts about the evolutionary progressive character of their genesis. The impossibility of achieving false similarities via a gradual accumulation of corresponding traits, whether by chance or as a consequence of "natural selection," is proven by a simple lack of time.” Here VN sheds doubts about the progressive character of evolution and the impossibility of false similarities as the result of a gradual accumulation of traits, despite the reliance of his  “fictional” argumentation on very abstract notions, as “the spirit of nature”, “the warehouse of the bestower” and his confessed “monism” (infinite variations inside a closed cosmos/warehouse ***).  

And would John Shade be striving after the above mentioned “spiritual alliance” and the mysterious patterns that are revealed only to “the illuminated” human minds by a “bestower”?

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*“The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis […]"Natural Selection," in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of "the struggle for life" when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation” (VN -  Speak, Memory)  

** - “How lovely it is, by the way, how one’s eye is caressed by [the Plusia rosanovi’s] …dark-cherry forewing, traversed by a mauve-pink stripe and adorned at its center by the golden emblem of its genus, in this instance a tapering, bowed half-moon — and if it is hard to render the flowery velvet of the background, what is one to say of the "emblem," which, on the actual moth, resembles a dab of gilt redolent of turpentine, and must therefore be copied (and recopied!) in such a way that the painter’s work transmits, besides all the rest, a resemblance to the work of a painter!” (“Father’s Butterflies”)

*** Cf. Sebastian Knight in Lost Property: 'All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter, whatever matter may be. The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition,' (p.83), quoted by V in RLSK..