Incoherent Zombie Assumptions

You never think of those things that make life, well, life. I mean, we have the physiology and anatomy that basically boils our life down to chemical reactions. Life, however, is much more than that. It has to be, or else we wouldn’t think that zombies were entirely bad. Actually, if zombies could be sentient creatures—with understanding, knowledge, and so forth---the zombism isn’t an entirely bad idea. Think about it. You would never die, never grow old. You’d just have to eat brains. Human brains, since every zombie tale specifies that zombies do not eat animal brains.

The question is, why do zombies crave human brains? Is it a special protein that could be synthesized? Manufactured in a laboratory? Most likely it is, since we can make pretty much anything—oh, and props to Australia for approving stem cell research. That will certainly be useful if we have to grow brains for the zombies.

There are two problems with this idea, however. First off, I’m assuming that there would be a few sentient zombies. Why am I assuming this? Ok, well the majority of movies portray zombies as beginning as a virus or chemical/biological warfare. If you put this in relationship with every other virus movie on the planet and every other chem/bio warfare movie, you would also assume that the virus would in fact mutate. And it would mutate at an astounding rate. If it is not a virus and really chem./bio warfare, then you would pretty much be screwed.

So back to the idea that zombism is a virus. If it is a virus, then it would be a virus that mutates human life through regeneration. This would mean that the virus itself would mutate while in the zombie body (in much the same way any other virus mutates) only because this is fictional it would mutate at an astounding rate. Eventually you would have sentient zombies who remembered their former unzombified lives and thus desired things that any normal human would desire.

And they would desire brains.

So now we have zombies running around with an agenda greater than just devouring brains. They would want to have intercourse, gain knowledge, have a home, self-actualization and self-affirmation.

Yet if zombies could acquire these things, would they in fact still be zombies by our definition? They would be ugly, gross, and probably still spew out pus (my favourite part of all the good zombie movies). But they would KNOW.

And knowledge is life.