> in. Hello to all my new virion friends by the way.
Hello!
> Memes do not operate in this way at all. A suicide meme can exist not
> only in a person's mind but in books, songs, etc. If all of the people
> in the world who harbored the suicide meme in any form at all were to
> suddenly act on the meme and commit suicide, the meme would still exist.
> In fact, its existence would probably be magnified immensely because of
> the publicity it would generate. Obviously, if everyone in the world
> who had blue eyes were to suddenly die from their eye color, the future
> of the blue eye gene would be dismal at best no matter how many
> newspaper articles were written about it.
This is very clear. I hereby recommend all read it again! A meme gets
propagated regardless of the success of the hosts *after* it has passed
through them. The Heaven's Gate people are another good example. Via
their web page (which I hear got over a million hits a day, after the
Big Event) many more people knew about their memes *after* they were
gone, than knew before. The matyr deal works the same way. Death is
more of a *benefit* to meme's than a loss! (barring total extinction of
humans, that is)
ERiC