If you are a fan of the Twilight series of books, the Vampire Diaries on TV, the Lost Boys, or just the idea of humans that live off human blood, it may surprise you to discover that this means you hate Darwin and the theory of evolution. But it’s true!
Vampires only make sense in a world of “Intelligent Design”—from an evolutionary standpoint they simply don’t work.
First, for a creature that lives off human blood, a vampire is an extremely inefficient design. What, for example, do Vampires need chest cavities as complex as humans? They don’t have internal organs do they? And if they do, what are these internal organs doing? Does a vampire have a full digestive track, and if so, what for? They only consume blood. Do they have kidneys and livers and appendixes? In reality, according to evolution, a creature that feasts off human blood should look a lot like a mosquito or maybe some kind of bat (Not sure what you’d call it. A blood-sucking bat? Who knows what the correct taxonomy is).
Next, there’s the question of how Vampires process blood and convert it into energy. Where does the blood go when a vampire consumes it? Do vampires go to the bathroom? If so, how does this work? A human body is made to process diverse foodstuffs into energy, from meat, to vegetables, to deep-fried covered twinkies. To ask that same body to only process blood is an evolutionary stretch.
Finally, how are we to understand vampires coming into existence? Did they evolve from mosquitoes? We could assume for example, that mosquitoes that look more similar to their prey could get closer to them without being seen and thus have a higher rate of survival. Over time, those mosquitoes with the most “human” characteristics—perhaps a mosquito with a beak that looks a little like a nose, or a mouth that looks a lot like Tom Selleck—have greater reproductive success until over millions of years, we get vampires.
That’s a stretch, it seems to me. How this level of complexity was achieved through selective mutation is unclear.
You may think this critique could be made against any magical creatures, like fairies, centaurs, and werewolves. But you’d be wrong. These animals are perfectly consistent with evolution, and in fact are based on real animals that display similar properties (the Moon beetle, for example, transforms from a normal, peaceful beetle to a meat-eating beetle-sized rodent during full moons).
It’s no wonder you find so many anti-evolution messages in vampire faire, as in the final book of the Twilight series where Edwin marvels: “I’ve been around for millions of years and seen a lot of crazy shit, but let me tell you, we didn’t come from monkeys. “
Tags: vampires
Good to know you’re spending your holidays profitably….
Oddly, Hollywood continues not to care whether vampires could reasonably be naturally selected for—cf. this magnificently composed plot synopsis of Daybreakers, on which film I am certain my students will write copiously next semester, with similar stylistic flair to this author:
“In the year 2019, a plague has transformed most every human into vampires. Faced with a dwindling blood supply, the fractured dominant race plots their survival; meanwhile, a researcher works with a covert band of vamps on a way to save humankind.”
[ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/ ]
I am already working on a draft of a 3-5 page paper on why that movie will be super awesome. My thesis is that the movie is trying to appeal to people who like vampire movies and that it does this through showing vampires in the movie, which as you know, is called Kairos.