Thread:User talk:Nebuchadnezzar/Memes/reply (5)

The idea is that memes are analogous to genes, so they replicate and natural selection acts on them in a cultural form. It's a kind of pseudo-evolutionary analogy, something like a linguistic social Darwinism. In its more extreme forms, meme theory is anti-evolutionary because it ignores or denies the evolved cognitive architecture of the brain/mind (see esp. Atran's critique on the memetics page). This is why "memetics" is not really taken seriously in the cognitive literature -- it's not really cog psych at all, more of pop-culture phenomenon, evolution as ideology.