Oct 26, 2006

vampire math and young earth creationism

Shockingly bad math proves that vampires aren't real:
Efthimiou sup­posed that the first vam­pire arose Jan. 1, 1600, around the be­gin­ning of a cen­tu­ry dur­ing which some of the first im­por­tant mod­ern writ­ings on vam­pires ap­peared. The re­search­ers es­ti­mat­ed the glob­al pop­u­la­tion at that time, based on his­tor­i­cal re­c­ords, as 537 mil­lion.

As­sum­ing that the vam­pire fed once a month and the vic­tim turned in­to a vam­pire, there would be two vam­pires on Feb. 1, four the next month, and eight the month af­ter that. All hu­mans would be vam­pires with­in 2½ years. “Hu­mans can­not sur­vive un­der these con­di­tions, even if our pop­u­la­tion were dou­bling each mon­th,” which is well be­y­ond hu­man ca­pa­ci­ties, Ef­thi­mi­ou said.
It's the same fallacy that presumes that if population growth is constant, then humans must have existed since only a few thousand years ago, a favorite argument of young earth creationists. The tidy calculation ignores the intervening variable: vampire hunters. They keep us safe--but not from bad assumptions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The original study also makes several assumptions that make it a poor model- there are no births of humans, there are no deaths other than by vampirism, vampires always feed (i.e. they never miss a meal), there are no isolated humans and no humans have vampire resistance, for starters.