apologies for the delay, karpT. i’m reading what both supporters and critics of memetics are saying, and i tend to agree with the critics. on one hand the type of meme that isn’t defined as a learned behavior through imitation - the ‘idea’ meme - is not analogous to the gene. take a typical idea… religious for instance. two people share this meme, it is said. now separate them and ask each one what they think the idea means. ask them to explain what the idea is… to express it ‘in other words’. you’d find that the two interpretations would increasingly deviate from one another as the idea was expounded on. in this sense, the initial idea meme isn’t discrete, unlike the gene. and as a unit of language, it is subject to all the complexities inherent to the practice of language games and has no original form in the first place. again, unlike the gene.
i also think the concept is redundant and used so much to describe human behavior patterns, that it’s become an arbitrary abstraction almost. if everything people do is memetic, then nothing they do is memetic. see what i mean?
about the only things that could be meaningfully described as memetic are actual observable behaviors that influence fitness level; tool making and use, for instance. and such behavior would not be culturally exclusive. anything else is either a vestigial behavior (neither increasing or decreasing adaptive ability), or so ambiguous it doesn’t constitute a stable, discrete entity in the first place.
before dawkins coined the word ‘meme’, everything anyone has since called memetic has always been called ideological. that general title has worked just fine. but the difference is, these guys are using biological evolution as a template for modeling something that is only analogous to genetics in a very abstract way.
but the easiest way to shut down the meme theory is to simply claim that mental content is epiphenomenal; thoughts and ideas don’t ‘cause’ behavior, but rather emerge in tandem or post-hoc. if such content can’t cause behavior, it can’t be responsible for being either advantageous or detrimental to adaptation and fitness level. memes of this kind would be analogous to scenes in a cartesian movie, so to speak.