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I shouldn't have used the word specular in connection to the iris rim. Just that it caught the light funny in that render.

It's all good. ;-)

Well what happens is if you sub-d a model with UVs, in Lightwave at least, it will often create UV distortion. In the case of the eye, it pulled the texture back from the edges, for lack of a better way to describe it. But I needed a smoother mesh, in order to pull the cornea out smoothly. It's actually shaped more realistically, but you can't tell because it's transparent. It made a difference with the refractions though, as one would expect.
The lighting, BTW, is two area lights with Monte Carlo radiosity, and from a background HDRI ( a light probe image of a kitchen interior), in case you were interested.

But when using subpatch objects in LW with UVs, you really should UV it as subpatches, as opposed to polygon UVs. Other apps handle it better, but Lightwave's subdivision surface wasn't really designed to be used on imported polygon OBJs. They have Catmull Clark now too, but I don't think they quite got it right.