Bill Barry's List: Polymath Ascendency

• Nabokov spent six years as a research fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, obsessing over the details of the Polyommatus blues. Furthermore, his speculative hunch about the evolution of these blue butterfly turns out to have been exactly right.
• Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime.
• Nabokov was absolutely right.
• The surprising accuracy
• helps overturn a longstanding impression among biologists that the novelist was a mediocre scientist
• Stephen J. Gould essay that castigated Nabokov for his “intellectual promiscuity,” his unwillingness to focus exclusively
• ould’s argument goes something like this: when a genius in one field (like art) spends substan
• tial intellectual capital laboring in another field (like science), it troubles us
• It’s worth pointing out that Nabokov himself would have fervently disputed Gould’s assertion. The novelist didn’t see his butterfly science as wasted effort or academic frivolity.
• Nabokov believed that his background in lepidoptera helped develop his deep passion for detail and precision. The same obsessive interest that helped him catalogue insect species also allowed him to write ecstatically vivid prose
• While Gould saw his dappling in science as a diffusion of his genius, Nabokov (convincingly) argued that his genius was actually a merger of these two distinct disciplines: “I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.”
• It’s also important to note that the advantage of having a “dual-identity” – being both a novelist and a scientist, for instance – isn’t limited to Nabokov. According to a study led by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, people who describe themselves as both Asian and American, or see themselves as a female engineer (and not just an engineer), consistently display higher levels of creativity. In the first experiment, the researchers gathered together a large group of Asian Americans and asked them to design a dish containing both Asian and American ingredients. In the second study, they asked female engineers to design a new mobile communication device.
• In both cases, subjects who are better able to draw on their mixed backgrounds at the same time were more creative than those who could only draw on one of their backgrounds.
• ecause their different social identities were associated with different problem-solving approaches, thei
• minds remained more flexible, better able to experiment with multiple creative strategies.In contrast, Asian Americans who felt that they had to “turn off” their Asian background in an American setting – this is an example of “low identity integration” – or  female engineers who believed that they had to be less feminine to be effective at work, had a harder time drawing on their wealth of background knowledge.
• The cognitive advantage of having a dual-identity returns us to the reason Gould was wrong about Nabokov. The novelist knew that his art benefited from his science
• Pluralism is always practical.

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