Comments on: Malthus: vampire slayer

By: zax

zax — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

So is there any information on the relative growth patterns of vampire hunters?

By: flytch

flytch — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

to make another vampire takes effort…. and it has to be someone you really *REALLY* want around because they are going to be around for a very long time… just think of how many wife’s you really want to keep around for a thousand years???? ewww…. hard to keep one wife happy ten years…

Think of it as the ultimate birth control…

By: Frank W

Frank W — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vampire populations go through boom-bust cycles of roughly a thousand years, with long intervals of what looks like near extinction. The few vampires that are long-lived spend by far most of their time in hibernation. Nobody notices just a few widespread disappearances.
There’s lots of human meat around right now. Expect them to be back in numbers once the Grand Ol’ Depression turns into full-on societal collapse.

By: jasonthemonkey

jasonthemonkey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I would not call this ground breaking. Did any one else here own a set of childcraft books as a youngster? Vol. 13 Mathemagic had a similar mathmatical arguement against vampires. Check out http://www.fustar.info/2008/09/25/do-you-see-what-is-happening/

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Getting an accurate count of the vampire population is notoriously difficult since census workers generally only work during the day.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

According to Kim Harrison, most undead vamps don’t last more than 30 years. Their support network dies off, they can’t develop a new support network because they’re kind of creepy and drinking blood from unwilling victims is like eternity eating lima beans. So they lose interest in unlife, go crazy and wander out into the sun. It’s a more nuanced view of vampirism, where the hunger is for love as much as for blood.

By: sapph

sapph — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thank the BoingBoing gods for this post. Because of it, I discovered the WONDERFUL novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. It is as good as Snow Crash, for all the same reasons.

By: Falcon_Seven

Falcon_Seven — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, come on! After all, this is the 21st century. Refrigerators, freezers, fresh blood, frozen blood (for those hot summer nights), whole blood, blood on tap, blood to go. Technology is a vampire’s best friend. They’ve never had it so easy or had so much choice.

By: Chrs

Chrs — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Again, population dynamics between predator and prey are not solely due to predator-prey interactions. They depend also on the interaction of the predators, in competing for territory, etc. Territory competition is an effective and possibly lethal mechanism to prevent overpredation, while not requiring any intelligent control of reproduction.

Not, of course, that said reduction would be impossible with vampires. The point is that there are many behavioral traits that can limit density in a potentially rapidly-growing population, based on known biology.

By: Synchronyme

Synchronyme — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Except that vampire don’t live forever: they fight each others, they can die by vampire hunter, werewolf, sun etc.

Obviously, Laura McLay isn’t familiar with White Wolf books: usualy vampires don’t create new vampires without the need for it. If they are too many already, they simply don’t.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vampires can choose if the want to create a new vampire or not; they’re not zombies !

Do your research !

By: NZheretic

NZheretic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot help thinking that the arguments here, for either side, could be also applied to what the official "spooks" are claiming in New Zealand. Since New Zealand is such a relatively small country, if there were actually real threats, then people would be "tripping over them" more often.

By: Will_Tingle

Will_Tingle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Until I read this I was scared shitless of vampires – thank god someone has put time and effort into proving they don’t exist.

Now, if someone could set my mind at rest about Werewolves, Zombies, Ghouls, Ghosts, Goblins, Trolls, Living Mummies, Invisible men and Frankenstein’s monsters, I’ll be able to get some sleep.

By: NZheretic

NZheretic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

NZ faces paranormal threats, SIS says New Zealand continually faces threats from Zombies, Werewolves, Demons and Vampires, the Supernatural Intelligence Service says in its annual report. The consequences of "realised threats" could include death, injury, very substantial property damage, compromise of government and private sector information and individual souls. The report for the year to June 2008, tabled in Parliament today, gives no details of the threats the country faces or where they come from. It says those details have been omitted for security reasons. "The service's targets continue to offer us new challenges," Director of Supernatural Funny Bucker said. "By and large they are pretty inventive. "And the external environment -- the opportunities and threats posed not just by the targets themselves but by the changing world we operate in -- means we need to think about improving all the time." The report says the SIS worked with the police on "various investigations" during the year under review when there was an overlap between psychics and law enforcement. During the year there were 25 domestic interception warrants in force and 14 of them were issued in the 12 months to June 2008. The other 11 were issued during the previous year but remained in force for some part of the year under review. "The methods of interception and seizure used were listening devices and the copying of documents," the report said. "The information obtained materially contributed to the detection of supernatural activities prejudicial to security." Apparently the budget for the NZ Supernatural Intelligence Service has to remain secret because, once again, such information would be prejudicial to security.

By: angusm

angusm — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In Peter Watts’ excellent SF novel “Blindsight” (in which vampires are present but not central to the plot), the human sub-species known as vampires hibernate to avoid wiping out their own food supply:

“With vampires … [the] problem wasn’t so much a lack of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn’t diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn’t learned how to ease off on the throttle. By the time they went extinct they’d learned to shut down for decades.”

By: bjacques

bjacques — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vampires are not the most social of beings, so I imagine there’s be an apocalyptic battle or two, once enough of them had worked out the population implications, but the survivors would work out some way to ranch humans so the supply didn’t run out. Or invest in stem cell research.

@#8 Will Tingle:

Sorry to break it to you, but trolls are everywhere.

By: xplosivrob

xplosivrob — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Darwins theory of evolution is the answer. we are all vampires really but our ancestors got jiggy with vampires we are the outcome…… see in the last 200 yrs our life expectancy has doubles more or less…. and a stake through the heart will kill us lol.

Women dont like garlic breath these are all pointers to the inevitable truth lol.

WE ARE ALL VAMPIRES

By: acb

acb — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Alvide Lindqvist’s “Let The Right One In” suggests that the majority of vampires commit suicide out of horror/despair at what they have become. Which could also keep numbers down, by introducing an extremely high “infant mortality” rate.

By: urshrew

urshrew — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Since Vampires are mythic beings, you would have to agree on their traits ahead of time to decide if they would wipe themselves out. Without knowing the mechanics of the vampire we’re speaking about, we can’t discuss reproductive rates. If the vampires in question created new vampires just by biting someone, then, well, we’ve all seen zombie movies. Since we’re assuming the drive for blood would be inherit in the vampire, they would aggressively reproduce. But most animals don’t reproduce by coming in contact with other animals, so if such of thing as vampire did exist, it would have to have some process of creating new vampires which would be, in some way controllable (ie, only killed victims rise as vampires, vampires can choose who receives their gift/curse, so forth and so on). Even minor controls would assure vampires could, indeed, keep their population from outsourcing their food supply.

God… did I just write all that?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

C’mon, Cory, I know you read Zelazny.

PS: If you hang a little statue of Kernunnos over your coffin, it might keep the dayhunters away… for a while…

By: Zed

Zed — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vampires are just way ahead of humans at maintaining sustainable growth.

By: James Turner

James Turner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I always thought that to turn into a vampire you had to not only be bitten, but also had to drink the blood of the vampire as well (see http://eruditebaboon.livejournal.com/13294.html). It’s a bit more complex than just running around biting as many people as you can and turning them all into insta-vampires. I – I think that’s zombies, right?

By: Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Watts' Blindsight is indeed, awesome, and not just on the population dynamics of vampires. It's one of my favourite pieces of SF ever, and it's available with a CC license at that link. (And when you've read that, buy it on Amazon)

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As people have alluded to, authors of vampire books are not as stupid as McLay suggests (not that her analysis is that original, as I’ve seen several similar ones, including bizarrely one on the physics preprint server ArXiv).

The idea that vampires can *choose* to create offspring rather than mindlessly creating a vampire out of every meal victim has a long tradition in fiction — even in the original _Dracula_ novel, as presumably Dracula fed off of and killed the crew of the the ship carrying Dracula’s coffin to England (it ran aground in Whitby with a dead crew) and yet none of the crew were later mentioned as becoming vampires.

By: Boeotian

Boeotian — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I always thought that was sort of obvious.
But only if you take into account how vampires turn others into vampires.
If you assume each bitten victim turns into one, well, they would rule the face of the earth.
But some authors have this more elaborate way of becoming a vampire, involving drinking their blood and all sort of rituals, so, that would reduce their multiplying capability drastically, so, who knows?

By: nanuq

nanuq — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You also haven’t taken into account the fact that vampires have natural predators that keep down their numbers. As the population of vampires become more active, so do their predators (let’s call them Buffies for short). While typically there’s only been one Buffy per generation (although this has changed recently), the one Buffy seems reasonably effective in keeping down vampire numbers and the vampire/Buffy ratio has remained a constant over time. This has been aided by anti-vampire hysteria that arises whenever vampires become too active.

Not that I’ve spent too much time thinking about this mind you…

http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2008/01/hunting-vampire.html

By: Eadwacer

Eadwacer — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There is obviously an optimum predation rate, given not just the stochastic processes that McLay talks about but also the standard Lotka-Volterra equations for predator/prey interactions. Here’s a paper on the topic:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0307904X83901178

By: codewench

codewench — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, I'm sad now, all these comments and not one mention of Peter Watts. rifters.com He might not have been the first to give a biological basis for vampiricism, but he sure did it with the most style. I mean come one, cross-wiring in the visual cortex as the fundamental basis for vampires aversion to crosses? Long term hibernation as a direct result of similar breeding rates between predator and prey? Hell, he even gave a decent explanation for why they need to drink blood, unlike most of the "realistic vampires" I've seen.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think a few people have pointed this out already, but most vampire lore holds that being bitten doesn’t automatically transform one into a vampire – vampires have discretion over whether their victims become vampires themselves or simply die.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

1) Not everyone who gets bit by a vampire turns into one, most of them die.

2) Actual vampire slayers keep the population down, such as Jefferson Twilight, the Blacula killer from The Venture Bros.