Jan Kulveit

Back to the question.

In 1856, a young Corsa woman named Nonkewas had a vision.

If the Corsa people killed all their cattle and destroyed their grain, their ancestors would rise from the grave, bring better cattle, and drive out the British colonizers.

The community was dealing with a cattle disease epidemic, which made this more plausible.

They adopted the belief.

They killed approximately 400,000 cattle.

A year later, about 40,000 people had died from starvation.

The survivors were forced to seek help from the colonizers they'd hoped to expel.

The community disintegrated.

From the perspective of cultural evolution, these memes destroyed their hosts.

But notice.

You're not a believer in coarser cattle-killing prophesies.

As far as I can tell nobody is.

The memes didn't survive either.

The belief died with the community that it destroyed.

There's an image here.

Heading.

Virulence.

There's a concept in epidemiology called the virulence transmission trade-off.

If a pathogen is too deadly, it doesn't spread well.