Najakcharmer
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
Consider this ; there are more species' on this planet than we are aware of, they fully admit that. There are some that they have a hard time figuring out how they survive. And then there are others. Insects that have incredibly high strength to weight ratios, in fact that is common, compared to humans. Then we have the story of the little old Lady lifting a car off her grandson, something like that.
Well, when you weigh .025 of a gram, it's not real hard to be amazingly strong for your weight. The scale for 100 kilogram organisms is literally meaningless when you attempt to apply it to <1 gram organisms. The square-cube law that is relevant here doesn't have much to do with human feats of strength. You'd be surprised what a little old lady or a tiny young girl can do, in terms of weight lifting, whether or not there's a car and a grandson involved. But that's nothing that the laws of physics and leverage can't account for.
I am a short small chick who's pushing 40. I occasionally lift weights with a strong, fit young man who is 25 years old - and I outlift him on most lifts, not because I have more muscle than he does, but because I have increased neural recruitment due to training. There's even shorter, smaller chicks than me who are lifting Olympic levels of weight. The secret is not bulging muscles - they don't have them - but optimum neural recruitment of muscle fibers. I can indeed deadlift or squat one end of a small to medium sized car at least a few feet off the ground, and so can anybody who's trained sufficiently with weights to optimize their neural recruitment. What's usually postulated about the untrained moms and grannies who lift cars in emergency situations is that instant neural recruitment happens, courtesy of extreme motivation.
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So, we know that there is DNA and RNA. The change in one molecule can have a very profound effect on your body.
That in mind, what if some agent comes along and changes you ?
Please go back to Biology 101 and learn what nucleic acids actually are, beyond the two paragraphs in Wikipedia, before you use your extremely limited knowlege to jump to bizzare conclusions. The process of achieving and fixing a beneficial mutation on a gene doesn't actually work that way outside of comic book land. Mostly what happens when an organism's nucleic acids are directly affected by a mutagen is that it dies or gets seriously fucked up. It is not productive to put a spider in the microwave so it can bite you and give you superpowers.
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To outline, your digestive tract is compromised and you can no longer absorb nutrition from normal food, you must ingest actual blood, that would contain the nutrients.
If your digestive tract was compromised to the point that you could not digest solid food, you'd be a) very sick and b) likely to get better results with easily digestible simple carbohydrates, like fruit juice. Blood is a coagulable protein and is very far from being the easiest food to digest for a patient with severe gastrointestinal compromise.
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Your eyes become very sensitive to sunlight, perhaps even your skin. Perhaps you can't tan, and folklore developed that a vamp would burn up in direct sunlight. But it would go a long way in impelling one to be nocturnal I would think.
You mean poryphria? If you're born with that, you do indeed have those issues, but it's not a mutation you get from being bitten by a radioactive spider. Er, vampire. Whatever. There doesn't seem to be much difference in the logic chain here.
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But you get to use 100% of your strength at will, not just in a fight or flight situation. With that superior strength to weight ratio you can move very fast. Thus some folklore about being able to disappear in a wiff of smoke. With this level of strength you can easily jump out a window on the second or higher floor without injury. Thus the myth that a vamp can fly.
Uh...so this theoretical radioactive-spider-vampire-DNA-mutation-molecule thingie you're postulating turns people into Superman with poryphria? No, really. Mutations don't work that way outside of comic books. When a mutagenic agent does influence an organism or its offspring by altering its DNA, the result does not tend to express as a simple, clinically observable trait and certainly not as a related collection of traits - even in the rare instances that the organism survives.
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And if injured, heals at an incredible rate. Thus the stake through the heart necessary to keep them "dead".
By what mechanism are you postulating this? Increased protein synthesis and anabolic metabolism through the endocrine system? Do you even have a clue what you're talking about, or is your scientific background entirely confined to reading about radioactive spiders and Kryptonite? And if you are postulating that such an incredibly advantageous mutation has ever spontaneously appeared in the gene pool of *any* species, how do you explain the fact that it has not firmly established in any species?
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I kniow this is whacked out, but some mythology has roots in fact. Perhaps there really was a Count Dracula a long time ago. Perhaps he was born that way. And then the story got embellished so much that it literally became fiction. Such things do happen over the years.
Mythology happens. Some people had poryphria, and some people were deluded enough to eat tiger penises or drink the blood of their enemies because they believed it would give them bigger hardons or whatever. And some other deluded people made up supernatural stories about them because they were too primitive and backward to understand basic biology and evolution. Kind of like you're doing.
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So taking away the unbelivable, and leaving the (just barely) believable, there is a possibility. A person can live on blood. I think if one drank the blood of a very healthy person, they would probably do quite well.
A person can live on any protein source if they also ingest sufficient fat. Homo sapiens is a pretty adaptable organism, nutritionally speaking. On a diet of pure protein you end up having pretty serious problems in fairly short order, unless you start out with a relatively high percentage of stored body fat. This has what to do with vampires?
If you don't actually understand the mechanism by which something works, eg, teratogenic or mutagenic agents affecting nucleic acids in an organism or its offspring, it's probably better to stfu than to make up comic book stories about how you think it might work.
< Message edited by Najakcharmer -- 2/26/2008 6:38:23 PM >
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RE: Vampires (bunked or debunked) - 
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