Lest anyone might still be deceived by the rhetorical excesses of so-called socio-biology, I would point out the non-biological and non-Darwinian character of memes.
Memes are non-biological. Biology is a broad domain of inquiry encompassing such diverse sub-disciplines as zoology, physiology, ecology, genetics and conservation science. Biology is a natural (i.e. physical) science. In the case of morphology the physical connection is obvious. In the case of animal behaviour, the connection is less straight forward, however in order to be of biological relevance, the goal is to translate the behaviour into some recognizable biological function. Memes suffer from the double disadvantage that they lack a physical basis in organismal biology or biochemistry, and furthermore it has not been demonstrated that memes perform any biological function or contribute to the survival or flourishing of the organism or any other level of biological organisation.
Memes and their putative transmission are characteristically non-Darwinian. The two big ideas of Darwinism are: 1) common ancestry; and 2) natural selection. Natural selection is the process of increased or decreased frequencies of biological traits within a population of organisms as the result of differential reproductive rates in ancestral generations. This mechanism is characteristically different from explanations based on the idea of heritability of acquired characteristics (also known as “Larmarckian” inheritance). Even if we counterfactually posit the biological reality of memes, it is immediately obvious that the memetic mode of inheritance is based on the propagation of a characteristic acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Furthermore, the heritability of memes is open to considerable doubt since the mode of transmission points to cultural processes, and the source of acquisition of the meme in question appears to have no genealogical component.
The uncritical acceptance of the idea of memes as a subjective way of relating to certain social phenomena might be a source of introspective insight, however memes are not explanatory. The idea is more at home within the discipline of psychology, or linguistics or semiotics or some such thing. It is not to be situated within evolutionary biology. Memes represent a non-explanatory, mentalistic, Lamarckian epicycle of thought that lacks standing in biology and is utterly extraneous to the Darwinian paradigm. On principle, serious evolutionary biologists should distance themselves from such biologically feeble theories.
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