A walking corpse by any other name...

May 15, 2007 10:54 AM

If zombies were real, what would their scientific name be?

All right, let's assume that the zombies in question are your basic Night of the Living Dead shamblers and no scientific explanation has definitively answered how they exist, where they come from and how it spreads, except through biting the living. It could be a disease, space radiation, a voodoo curse or a secret military experiment or something else altogether. What would scientists call them in their research papers? Would they be categorized as a new species, a disease, or what?

posted by clockworkjoe to Science & Nature (22 answers total)

Awesome.
posted by ElmerFishpaw at 11:01 AM on May 15, 2007

I'd say it'd have to be a disease. They are still people shaped with mostly human characteristics, and are anatomically humanoid.
posted by ZackTM at 11:02 AM on May 15, 2007

Heh - Roadrunner style: Corpsicus Alacritas Horribilis
posted by Tubes at 11:03 AM on May 15, 2007

Homo Romerus?
posted by Elsa at 11:07 AM on May 15, 2007

Urban Dictionary: Homo Coprophagus Somnambulus

But I'm with Elsa. H. Romerus.


Is this a military concern or a public health crisis?
Both.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:12 AM on May 15, 2007

I think they'd be categorized as a virus. Lyssavirus X, possibly. And Home Romerus is awesome.
posted by iconomy at 11:14 AM on May 15, 2007

homos anima mortis
posted by andrewzipp at 11:15 AM on May 15, 2007

The method of transmission of zombiehood is pretty much identical to that of classical cases of rabies--through a bite. And no one would categorize the rabies-infected as being a different species. So your answer is that zombiehood would be considered, by the scientifically minded, to be a disease.

Although I've always been a bit puzzled as to how rapidly the zombie plague spreads. Zombies want to eat you, and usually they gang-tackle you and devour you. In their swarm attacks, there are comparatively few cases where they just nip someone who escapes being a meal but is cursed to be converted, either in seconds by the Rage virus or minutes or hours in more traditional forms of zombification. So I'm not sure how they can proliferate so quickly, since most victims are chow, not new recruits.
posted by Midnight Creeper at 11:15 AM on May 15, 2007

categorized as a new species

Not until they start lobbying for Title IX protected status.
posted by mkultra at 11:16 AM on May 15, 2007

So, if scientists would view zombie-ism as a disease, what would the disease's scientific name be? As for the spread, I think in Night of the Living Dead, all recently dead corpses arise as zombies.
posted by clockworkjoe at 11:29 AM on May 15, 2007

Well, new species are designated when the new organisms have moved far enough away genetically that there is either a pre-fertilization barrier or a post-fertilization barrier (i.e. that their genitalia does not work together or that one species cannot fertilize another). I'm not sure if the definition of Zombie is consistent enough between movies to come up with a clear cut answer. It would depend on how the virus affects the person really, on a case by case basis.

But the whole field of species designation is a confusing one in general. Reproductive differentiation is just one.
posted by jourman2 at 11:33 AM on May 15, 2007

I work in a library, and my friend in technical services just catalogued The Zombie Survival Guide : Complete Protection from the Living Dead. We've got this book and other artistic works like 28 Weeks Later coming out around the same time, and now this question. What's with the recent interest in zombies? I'm not picking, I'm genuinely interested.

Also, that book is catalogued as nonfiction, which we thought was pretty awesome.

And I know very little about Latin, so I can't add any new variant, but homos anima mortis made me laugh.
posted by LiliaNic at 11:35 AM on May 15, 2007

I disagree that zombies wouldn't merit a whole new classification because they would just be people with a disease. Zombies are not people. They are reanimated corpses. However, I agree that they will not deserve a separate classification. Binomial nomenclature is used by biologists to name new species. A species consists of individual organisms which are very similar in appearance, anatomy, physiology and genetics due to having relatively recent common ancestors. An organism is a living complex adaptive system of organs that influence each other in such a way that they function in some way as a stable whole. Life is a condition that distinguishes animals, humans, plants, and organisms from inorganic objects, dead organisms and zombies being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

Zombies aren't alive because they don't grow through metabolism or adapt to their environment (classic "Urrr... Brains" zombies). Because they are not alive, they are not an organism, and because they are not organisms, they are not a species, and because they are not a species they do not require a scientific name. They require a bullet to the brain.
posted by ND¢ at 11:36 AM on May 15, 2007

Zombies are real.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:38 AM on May 15, 2007

Midnight Creeper: It's mostly a function of the size of the horde. If 3 zombies are grabby, you'll get a little torn up but rise from the dead relatively intact. With 20 grabby zombies, you'll be lucky if you can still be a zombie torso that claws its way around. You'll be less use to zombies as a whole if you get mangled, but they really don't need you in that specific group (21 zombies at arm's reach isn't much more destructive than 20 zombies).

And for zombies eating, one alone isn't gonna want more than a few mouthfuls. Or to slurp your intestines like spaghetti. They'll get bored and move on before they do too much damage. It's the numbers that really tear you apart.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:41 AM on May 15, 2007

What's with the recent interest in zombies?

Inexplicable Zombie Renaissance. Best not to question it.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:44 AM on May 15, 2007

Not until they start lobbying for Title IX protected status.

Zombies was people too.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:49 AM on May 15, 2007

If life begins at conception, death ends with "removing the head, or destroying the brain". Therefore, zombies are Homo sapiens up to and until brain death. QED.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:51 AM on May 15, 2007

I'm going to have to take a stand, here. Dear old Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomy, would probably have classified zombies as a separate species from mankind just on the basis of structural and behavioural dissimilarities (this is ignoring, of course, the phylogeny of zombies, which wasn't really taken into account in taxonomy anyway until the theory of evolution).

These things having been said, I would classify zombies as

Homo Cereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebri

(Cereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebri translates, roughly, to Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains!)
posted by Wavelet at 11:58 AM on May 15, 2007

If I were writing a paper about them I would call them
"the inflicted"
posted by crewshell at 12:03 PM on May 15, 2007

oh crap, really that should have been Cereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebra, instead. I should decline more often, obviously.
posted by Wavelet at 12:05 PM on May 15, 2007

"So I'm not sure how they can proliferate so quickly, since most victims are chow, not new recruits."

Dude, cosmic rays. Scientists would probably regard them as mutations, but still part of the same species.
posted by klangklangston at 12:38 PM on May 15, 2007