The definition of a meme
Dilbert walks into a meeting and asks, “Who called this meeting?” The male coworker replies, “We thought you did.” The coworker continues, “I think we should discuss issues and assign tasks so it’s not a complete waste of time.” Dilbert responds, “Maybe meetings have become a lifeform capable of calling themselves and thus reproducing via human hosts.”
Dilbert
Can memes go extinct? If they spread by natural selection why doesn’t socialism go extinct? Or perhaps socialists would prefer this question: why doesn’t religion go extinct?
Perhaps nothing goes extinct, the dinosaurs included. They simply change form — into birds — in this case. The Tower of Babel may be with us still in the form of the GND. The Tower didn’t fall, it’s simply hidden information.
Someone else wrote: “Ideas can be spontaneously generated which is why the cannot go extinct. A lineage could die out; if the last person who believed in it and all records of it were destroyed so it couldn’t infect new hosts. But then another human could independently come up with the same idea.”
That is like the Boltzmann Brain scenario. Given enough time everything will happen again and again. And thus, even if the Greenies succeed in killing off conscious life to let Gaia live, nature will try again and eventually the Greenies lose.