rfmcdonald | [LINK] Two links on zombies in our world (Reply)

First, political scientist and blogger Daniel Drezner--a man who has built his reputation in part on the question of the zombie--takes issue with what he calls an "appalling lack of zombie preparedness in the Great White North" evidenced by Foreign Minister John Baird's speech.

Now, to be honest, I'm a bit disturbed by this exchange. First of all, there were so many better puns that Baird could have uttered.

Second of all, both the NDP representative and the Foreign Minister were poorly briefed. Sure, Martin knew about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Quebec government's counter-zombie efforts, but why no mention of British Columbia's aggressive campaign against the living dead?! That seems like rank prejudice against Canada's Western provinces.

Third, how in the name of all that is reanimated could the Canadians have this debate without discussing Canada's distinguished contributions to the zombie genre? No mention of Pontypool? No mention of Fido?! Come on!!!

Fourth, the claim that zombies could effortlessly cross borders echoes a leading Canadian perspective on this issue ... but where's the expert testimony? Why no international relations perspective? It's not like Theories of International Politics and Zombies isn't available in Canada.

This is serious business. Winter has come. The White Walkers could be emigrating down from the North at any moment. Until Canada gets its house in order, secures its strategic maple syrup reserve from waffle-eating ghouls, and starts consulting experts on this issue, I for one, am taking my family south.

Perhaps more seriously, Canadian science fiction writer and biologist Peter Watts comes up with a plausible basis for the zombie, at least in the universe of The Walking Dead: the zombie condition is the mechanism used by a parasite to reproduce itself, by radically modifying human behaviour. It's not as if there aren't plenty of parasites which already do exactly that.

Let’s start with evolution. Why do walkers attack the living in the first place? How does the consumption of living flesh promote the fitness of dead flesh? Doesn’t the fact that the flesh is dead mean that it’s pretty much out of the whole Darwinian race by definition?

>Obviously it’s not the agenda of the flesh — living or dead — that’s at issue here. The flesh is simply a delivery platform for something still subject to natural selection— and in terms of real-world biology, it’s almost too easy. Readers of my rifters books (or of Carl Zimmer‘s more plausible nonfiction ones) may remember fireside tales of Sacculina, the parasitic barnacle that rewires the behavior of infected crabs so that they stop worrying about their own welfare and instead spend their time aerating the larvae growing inside them, even helping them disperse once they hatch. Or you may be reminded instead of Ophiocordyceps, the mind-controlling fungus that leaves its host’s motor nerves intact while it devours everything else — and which finally, when its victim is little more than an exoskeletal husk stuffed with fungus, takes the reins and forces that poor hollowed-out insect to assume a perch oriented at the optimum angle for spore dispersal just before it dies.

My own personal favorite is Dicrocoelium, a fluke that uses ants as a stepping-stone into the ruminant it targets as its definitive host. Each night Dicro forces its ant to climb to the top of the nearest convenient blade of grass and lock itself in place with its mandibles, leaving it vulnerable to the grazing habits of any nearby cow or sheep. It’s also smart enough to release its ride when the sun comes up, to let it resume its usual anthill duties (remaining locked to that blade of grass during daylight would toast the host beneath the noonday sun, which would benefit neither rider nor ridden). Recent studies have shown that the reins tugged by Dicro are neurological: it actually hacks into the central nervous system to work its magic.

And I’m not even going to bother to link to our old friend Toxoplasma gondii.

The take-home message is that any number of real-world parasites conscript unwilling flesh in the service of their own dissemination. It doesn’t matter whether the agents who walk the dead are viral, bacterial, or helminth: natural selection will promote any behavior that spreads the infection. Jumpstart the most basic locomotory responses; reboot the ancient reptile drives; shock the carcass into motion. What does it matter that those ancient predatory reflexes no longer serve to nourish the corpus, that meat instinctively bitten chewed and swallowed won’t ever be digested in the service of mammalian metabolism? The biting and chewing itself is enough to spread the infection. The swallowing is mere collateral: an irrelevant side-effect of some macro evolved for one function, then repurposed to another.