One scholar has done the math, and must conclude that there cannot be vampires among us. Physicist Costas Efthimiou starts from the dawn of the seventeeth century. That's a bit early for the great vampire panics, but will do in a pinch. Klaniczay spots an incident in 1591.
On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.
If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect.
However.
First, I would start things off about a century later. The great vampire panics are really creatures of the Enlightenment era. Marigny notes Karl Ferdinand Scherz’s De magia postuma in 1706 (on the Moravian undead) and Fluckinger's Visum et Repertum in 1732. "vampire" hits the OED around 1732 or 1734. The Paoli/Paole case happened shortly thereafter, leading to Dom Augustin Calmet’s celebrated treatise Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Démons et des Espits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, et de Silésie (1746, then 1751), Heinrich August Ossenfelder published "Der Vampire" (1748). How do the stats fall out when we reset to, say, 1725?
Second, Efthimiou clearly sidesteps various population control measures. Vampires breeding humans carefully, humans checking the nosferatu numbers, etc. Not to mention problems internal to the vampire race, either political (self-control, infighting, etc) or biological (infection, plague).
(thanks, ever-resourceful Jesse Walker)
He also assumes every feeding results in a new vampire.
Tim posted on this as well: here
Posted by: Steven | October 27, 2006 at 16:48
Yes.
Perhaps the Catholic Church would prefer it if every feeding resulted in a new vampire, but the fact is that young people today -- and this is as true today as it was today, and today before that -- often feed for the sheer physical delight of it, without thought of the todays to come...
Posted by: Chaerles Cameron | October 28, 2006 at 13:42