![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/hr_the_walking_dead.jpg\" "\\"hr_the_walking_dead\\"")
<\/a>I’ve never read the Walking Dead graphic novels (unlike, apparently, every thirteen-year-old at Bowmore Public School), but I’m a big fan of the AMC series.\u00a0 I’ve been a fan from the first episode. I even liked the second season, experiencing it not as the wheels of plot spinning ever-deeper into the mud, but as the kind of slow burn necessary to set up an explosive and devastating payoff.\u00a0 (There are other views, I know. After the second season, one person of my acquaintance described the show as an abusive spouse who promised to never do it again if you’d just give it another chance. Which implies either an unhealthy degree of emotional investment in a TV show, or a curiously lighthearted perspective on domestic violence.)<\/p>\nWhat I truly admire about this series is a sense of verisimilitude<\/em> uncommon in any genre show, much less one about zombies. Of course, the Walking Dead isn’t really about zombies; it’s basically a grown-up Lord of the Flies<\/em>, an exploration of how ‘civilized’ people react when the rug gets yanked out from under them. It’s got more in common with McCarthy than with Romero. Many of the series’ set-pieces\u2014 the napalming of the cities, the tense hair-trigger negotiations between groups of survivors encountering each other in the aftermath, the grim gritty recognition that this ain’t a democracy any more<\/em>\u2014\u00a0 would be just as suited to the aftermath of a meteor strike or a Mitt Romney presidency.\u00a0 The issues explored here carry more than a whiff of Ron Moore’s Galactica before it went down the New-Age toilet on us.<\/p>\n But only hints. There’s never been any kind of explicit explanation for the zombie apocalypse that kicked off the AMC edition of The Walking Dead<\/em>, and my understanding is that the graphic canon hasn’t dealt with it either.<\/p>\n This will not stand. And since the series has pretty explicitly described the apocalypse as biological in nature, who better to handle the retcon than the fallen biologist who singlehandedly redeemed the crucifix glitch?<\/p>\n 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<\/em> mean that it’s pretty much out of the whole Darwinian race by definition?<\/p>\n Photo credit Hans Hillewaert<\/p><\/div>\n Obviously it’s not the agenda of the flesh \u2014 living or dead \u2014 that’s at issue here. The flesh is simply a delivery platform for something still subject to natural selection\u2014 and in terms of real-world biology, it’s almost too easy. Readers of my rifters books (or of Carl Zimmer<\/a>‘s more plausible nonfiction ones) may remember fireside tales of Sacculina<\/a><\/em>, 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<\/a><\/em>, the mind-controlling fungus that leaves its host’s motor nerves intact while it devours everything else \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/a>And yet, there are<\/em> zombies. Pretty convincing ones, too, at least on a visceral level. There are even hints, here and there, of a quasi-biological basis for their existence: occasional glimpses of walkers just standing<\/em> there, immobile, conserving energy until kickstarted by some external stimulus. The Governor’s tame scientist, observing that Michonne’s armless jawless pack zombies (and decapitated zombie heads, for that matter) were starving to death very slowly<\/em>. The revelation of some kind of viral involvement during that ill-fated sleepover at the CDC \u2014 not to mention the localization of neural reactivation in the brain stem (although this begs the question of why, if the cerebral hemispheres are suddenly so irrelevant, all those forehead shots are so damn effective).<\/p>\n<\/a>