Crank linguistics
Not the first time this has been thrashed out on this talk page. Basically, there's no way to define a "meme" meaningfully enough to apply evolutionary concepts to it. Dawkins' suggestion of it, to me, always seems more like a neat (if messy) little analogy than a serious piece of science.
Pretty much -- I just find it funny that skeptics/rationalists/whatever you want to call them go crazy over vague terms bandied about by pseudoscientists like "toxins" as being unscientific (which is true), but when it comes to memes...well, it doesn't need to be precisely defined, it's a "new way of looking at things," and so on.
The internet is pretty much the only place where completely inelastic memes, which exchange in high-fidelity, exist. Cat pictures, quickmeme.com, viral campaigns and so on.
Elsewhere, I think there is something to be said about "here's an idea", let's watch it move. But only if you realise how malleable an idea "is". That makes a meme as a unit a little problematic because unlike a gene that might stay intact with little to no mutation from generation to generation, a memetic equivalent might get completely hacked apart by the receiver. Or it might not. It's that which makes the gene analogy fall apart because the odds of inheriting a gene from a parent aren't dependent on the gene itself or what you already have.
And frankly, that brings us back to the *other* topic bandied about often.
"can I ever, reasonably know what you mean by an 'thing', and what your experience of an 'idea' is."
To suggest that there are memes, as a "super thing", which shift and change over time, and that it can be measured in any meaningful way, would mean that each meme or idea must be precisely the same for the users - and we all know that's not the case. "Jesus, Lord and Savior" is, if you grant it, a "meme". But what it means is completely dependent on the person experiencing it (hearing, speaking or thinking it). In the study of Native American religions after contact, the core of my studies was how christian theology impacted native theology (and to a small extent, the other way round). But every single time you interview a person, and ask about Taku Skan Skan, "Grandfather", "great spirit", Wakan Tanka, the best you can do is work with that individual and try to make some kind of broad statements from 15 unique experiences.
Genes, actually blood guts and gore, type, are shared as almost exact copies, and it is the differences that can be codified and measured. So you can see gene shift, you can see transition and mark it. "This happened X years ago".
I'm rambling. sorry.
PS, "hypertext" was a huge "new way of thinking in the uni in 95, 96 area. "this is a web page set up, and you can make links to other things, which will revolutionize how we think, how we read, how we understand our world". Hum... doesn't seem to have changed all that much, cept it feeds my ADD more.
It's funny that meme has become so synonymous with internet memes, because that seems to be one of the few places it might actually work, esp. due to high fidelity copying. Meme-like concepts have been around for quite a while, e.g., A.O. Lovejoy's "unit idea," which is not really scientific, but he wrote some pretty interesting history.