It's flu season and a hundred and one years ago this winter the H1N1 flu virus arrived for the first time

known as the Spanish flu, it infected 500 million people.

It infected people in the Arctic.

It infected people on remote Pacific islands. It ended up killing

between 50 million and 100 million people. That's about 5% of all the people on Earth. And the thing is, the

flu didn't do it on purpose.

Hey, it's Ben Skoda, and this is a special archived episode of a Kimbo.

What does the flu virus want? Well it doesn't want anything, not in the sense that

you want a back rub or a vegan ice cream sandwich. Now it wants something because that's a good way to understand its behavior.

Richard Dawkins wrote a book years ago that has been misunderstood. behavior. Genes don't make us selfish, but it is easier to understand how genes work if we imagine

that they are selfishly trying to replicate.

Well, in the case of the flu virus,

a successful flu virus is one that can live in a lot of people.

If you start killing off the people where you are living, well then your prospects for the future go down,

particularly if it had been just one order of magnitude more effective and had wiped out half or more of the population.

Kill all the humans, you've ended up killing the flu virus as well.

So what does the flu want? It wants to spread. And this is a short

podcast about something else, viruses that are ideas.

In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins threw away a chapter talking about this idea he had called

mametics.

He said what if we could understand the spread of ideas

by applying the thinking of epidemiology?

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