Vampire biology site!

POSTED BY: CrevanReaver
UPDATED: Thursday, January 4, 2007 03:28
VIEWED: 4743
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CREVANREAVER

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 8:01 PM

A brilliant Canadian author/biologist named Peter Watts has come up with amazing scientific explanations as to how vampires could exist in the real world. He even came up with a completely scientific reason crosses could hurt them.

This is a 36 minute video, but it is well worth the time. You'll see what I mean. It's even funny.

http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

CREVANREAVER

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 9:01 PM

After you've watched it, post comments.

I interested in what other people thought of this guy's scenario.

CREVANREAVER

Thursday, March 16, 2006 8:50 AM

Here is the complete transcript of the video:

This is Donnie Maass, a nine-year-old high-functioning autistic savante from New York; very limited social skills, but he could calculate six-digit prime numbers in his head. If you recognize the name, you'll know that this picture was taken before he was subjected to experimental therapy in which a tweaked retrovirus rewrote certain critical genes linked to his condition. Basically, we hoped to cure his autism by rewriting his code at the molecular level.

This is Donnie Maass eight weeks after the onset of gene therapy. This discoloration is not anemia; Donnie's blood volume had actually increased by seven percent-but he had begun to redistribute the blood volume away from the peripheral tissues and sequester it deep in the core, for reasons that were (at that time) unknown. And while this bloodless complexion is Donnie's most obvious physical symptom, there were others, including marked recession of the gum-line, and increased reflectivity of the retina, reminiscent of the tapetum lucidum found in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal predators. We also noticed behavioral changes-Donnie exhibited increased activity levels during nighttime and began sleeping during the day, and during sleep his metabolic rate fell to about half of what it should have been.

Perhaps most disturbingly, psychological testing revealed an increasing lack of affect and reduced responses to emotionallycharged stimuli. When shown photos of people mutilated during car accidents or Homeland Security interviews, for example, Donnie's skin conductivity and ECG were scarcely different from when he was shown neutral pictures such as landscapes or stilllifes. (We would have liked to pursue this aspect further, and had in fact arranged for a series of MRIs, but Donnie’s parents withdrew permission after one of our technicians accidentally left the slideshow running during visiting hours):

Suffice to say, based on the data we did collect, Donnie was developing the behavioural symptoms of a clinical psychopath; he was scoring progressively higher on the Hare Psychopathy checklist, and his empathy quotient-which was pretty low to begin with-began dropping even further.

At around the same time his performance on general patternmatching and logic tests began increasing, and his numerical hyperperformance-which had always been limited to the calculation of primes-began manifesting in other areas as well. Donnie was suddenly able to perform calendar tricks, and he developed a real facility for calculus. Unfortunately we were never able to assess the ultimate extent of his abilities, since around the eleven-week mark he grew increasingly uncooperative with our research staff, and at times became quite violent.

This is a picture of Donnie taken just prior to autopsy, sixteen weeks after the onset of therapy. The gumline recession has become unmistakably pronounced, as has the skin pallor (although the fact that Donnie is dead may be a factor here as well). The rictus reflects Donnie’s condition at death; in fact, he died following the onset of sudden violent convulsions which strongly resembled grand mal seizures. Like epilepsy, these seizures appear to have been provoked by some critical visual stimulus--but he wasn't watching any flashing or strobing lights when the convulsions began. He was viewing a multimedia display we'd used for psychological testing many times before, without any problems. Looking back, he had grown increasingly reluctant to use the display in the days prior to his complications; this might have suggested some kind of aversion building over time. Back then, of course, we reasonably assumed that this was part and parcel of his increasing overall belligerence, and there was no reason to expect that strapping him down, pinning his eyes open and forcing him to watch the display would have had such dramatic results. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

At any rate, this is the multimedia panel that provoked Donnie’s difficulties. And as it turns out, it wasn't so much

CYBERSNARK

Thursday, March 16, 2006 3:30 PM

Actually, the garlic aversion does make a kind of sense: garlic alters your blood chemistry (in much the same way that alcohol enters the bloodstream instead of being digested). It could be that the scent of garlic-laden blood is reminiscent of some blood-borne disease or something that the vampires instinctually avoid.

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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

CREVANREAVER

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 5:49 PM

Here is an endnote from Peter Watts in his novel Blindsight, the book that the concept was created for:

* BP means "before present"

Homo sapiens vampiris was a short-lived Human subspecies which diverged from the ancestral line between 800,000 and 500,000 BP*. More gracile than either neanderthal or sapiens, gross physical divergence from sapiens included slight elongation of canines, mandibles, and long bones in service of an increasingly predatory lifestyle. Due to the relatively brief lifespan of this lineage, these changes were not extensive and overlapped considerably with conspecific allometries; differences become diagnostically significant only at large sample sizes.

However, while virtually identical to modern humans in terms of gross physical morphology, vampiris was radically divergent from sapiens on the biochemical, neurological, and soft-tissue levels. The GI tract was foreshortened and secreted a distinct range of enzymes more suited to a carnivorous diet. Since cannibalism carries with it a high risk of prionic infection, the vampire immune system displayed great resistance to prion diseases, as well as to a variety of helminth and anasakid parasites. Vampiris hearing and vision were superior to that of sapiens; vampire retinas were quadrochromatic (containing four types of cones, compared to only three among baseline humans); the fourth cone type, common to nocturnal predators ranging from cats to snakes, was tuned to near-infrared. Vampire grey matter was "underconnected" compared to Human norms due to a relative lack of interstitial white matter; this forced isolated cortical modules to become self-contained and hypereffective, leading to omnisavantic pattern-matching and analytical skills.

Virtually all of these adaptations are cascade effects that— while resulting from a variety of proximate causes— can ultimately be traced back to a paracentric inversion mutation on the Xq21.3 block of the X-chromosome. This resulted in functional changes to genes coding for protocadherins (proteins that play a critical role in brain and central nervous system development). While this provoked radical neurological and behavioral changes, significant physical changes were limited to soft tissue and microstructures that do not fossilise. This, coupled with extremely low numbers of vampire even at peak population levels (existing as they did at the tip of the trophic pyramid) explains their virtual absence from the fossil record.

Significant deleterious effects also resulted from this cascade. For example, vampires lost the ability to code for Protocadherin Y, whose genes are found exclusively on the hominid Y chromosome. Unable to synthesise this vital protein themselves, vampires had to obtain it from their food. Human prey thus comprised an essential component of their diet, but a relatively slow-breeding one (a unique situation, since prey usually outproduce their predators by at least an order of magnitude). Normally this dynamic would be utterly unsustainable: vampires would predate humans to extinction, and then die off themselves for lack of essential nutrients.

Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy (the so-called "undead" state)—and the consequent drastic reduction in vampire energetic needs— developed as a means of redressing this imbalance. To this end vampires produced elevated levels of endogenous Ala-(D) Leuenkephalin (a mammalian hibernation-inducing peptide) and dobutamine, which strengthens the heart muscle during periods on inactivity.

Another deleterious cascade effect was the so-called "Crucifix Glitch"— a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback siezures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed

CREVANREAVER

Friday, December 22, 2006 5:45 AM

...and here is the PDF file:

http://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf

FIZZIX

Tuesday, December 26, 2006 1:42 AM

Okay, I'm lazy, so I read it. Blech... took forever.
But still. Interesting enough. So, what, do you live on the internet to find this sort of thing?

YEah... oddly, I've seen a couple of different scientific approaches. One such being Diabetes.

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May not be smart, and it may not please you, but you're definitely gonna see what I have to say.

DRU

Thursday, January 4, 2007 2:00 AM

I found it very interesting. I wonder if this site is part of a marketing campaign for a new vampire movie.

AERIN

Thursday, January 4, 2007 3:28 AM

Wow. Just found this. I'm a huge vampire nut and a nerdy scientist. I've sat through a lot of research talks, and this guy does such a good job that it's almost hard to believe it's. Scary-hard to believe, since he calmy dicusses radically unethical practices. Who's the real vampire?