Will leave it to the two physicists to sort this one out regarding “memetics”. I’m siding with Antoine’s version of the “memetics is magic” approach (c.f. “Dawkins’ magical, made-up theory” below), rather that with @mitchellmckain’s “coopting the ideas and terminology of…” atheist biologists.
This is one of the articles I wrote on memetics back in 2013, which offers a view from someone in the “cultural sciences” (if there counts such a thing), the fields in which “cultural replication” belongs and has been historically studied, under non-Dawkinsian meanings. Collective Vision - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Call me crazy, but when I make use of peoples’ theories, I usually try to find the right, most qualified person for the task of constructing them. A biologist with little training in philosophy, and a disdain for theology, doing cultural studies, was bound to be a disaster in proposing a “cultural theory” to begin with. And thus, memetics failed.
At least it would be helpful if the proponent of “memes” in this thread would openly recognise the glaring mismatch in the case of Dawkins’ “cultural theory of mimetics”. Will he?