Victorian era

The Victorian era is invoked as the cultural source of two linked myths: Gothic vampires as nocturnal threats and nature as relentless competition. Against these images, the book sets observations of vampire bats sharing blood and maintaining loyal ties, recasting them as possible emblems of cooperation rather than selfishness.

Gothic Myths and Nature

For devotees of Victorian Gothic, vampires are dark forces that terrorize by night and take vital fluids. Joined to the era’s other myth of nature as a realm of tooth-and-claw struggle, this figure seems to embody the bleakest picture of a world governed by selfish genes. The passage treats that resemblance as a cultural construction, not as evidence about how bats actually behave.

Evidence Against the Inherited Image

The author argues that evolutionary theory supplies principles, not detailed predictions about particular organisms; the truth in individual cases must be investigated. The preceding account of captive vampire bats provides a concrete counterpoint: when bats were deprived of food and returned to their roost, they were usually fed by old companions from the same cave, rather than by bats from a different cave. Such findings complicate the familiar image of the vampire as a creature of solitary predation.

From Gothic Threat to a Myth of Sharing

The passage proposes that the real behavior of vampire bats could support a different cultural story: one of sharing and mutualistic cooperation. Its contrast between kinship and lasting bonds beyond kinship turns blood, conventionally associated with menace in vampire lore, into an image of loyalty. The Victorian-era reference therefore marks not just a historical style of horror but a myth the book seeks to revise: even when genes are described as selfish, cooperative individuals may thrive.