The Futile Cycle

Voltage-change weak
Potassiums leak
Sodium flow
Very slow
Voltage jumps
Ion flow bumps
Opens the gates
Propagates

So, it appears the mainstream media (AP) has picked up on a physicist’s analysis of paranormal phenomena (i.e. his debunking). Many of them seem amused by his discussion of vampires, where in his paper (from ArXiv) he “proves” that vampires cannot have existed.

Unfortunately, his analysis is a bit shoddy. He assumes that vampires first started at around 1600, and multiply geometrically every month (i.e. 1 bites another, next month the two bite two more, and so on). But as every population biologist knows, creatures don’t just multiply geometrically; there is always death, whether by old age or an epipen to the heart. The dynamics of vampire existence should be closer to the Lotka-Volterra equations (i.e. the predator prey interactions). Mathematicians have studied this problem. A simple excerpt (emphasis mine) from the paper, “Cycles of Fear: Periodic Bloodsucking Rates for Vampires”:

…Neither the economic significance of vampirism nor the optimality of bloodsucking strategies has been analyzed by means of rational modeling….In all these formulations, however, the resulting monotonic state trajectories and bloodsucking rates are not in accordance with empirical evidence. It is well known that the appearances of vampires follow a typical cyclical behavior. Therefore this paper’s purpose is to extend the model in such a way that more realistic cyclical bloodsucking patterns are optimal.

Thus, it is readily explainable how populations can support vampires. Take that, mister physicist. Don’t insult us vampire-believing folk, with your statements that “Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.” Your level of mathematical sophistication is too low to appreciate the true complexity of the ecology of vampires!