Take a successful theory in one domain, and build your new theory that s analogous with it. Genetic evolution is a very bad model for cultural evolution because ideas are exactly not transmitted unchanged from one generation to another. They re just not gene-like objects. Griffiths thinks that memes are a beat-up. Above all, he says, meme theory is profoundly un-Darwinian, because it can' explain why some memes flourish, and others go extinct.
Evolutionary biology contains a vast and complicated science of who s fitter than who.
You give me a range of birds with different kinds of wings, you tell me that they live in a piece of rainforest, and I ll tell you which one is fitter, without measuring who survives. In memetics, it s unclear that saying that something is a meme with a high replication potential is any more scientific than saying that it s a catchy tune or a fashionable thing. You want to explain why bell-bottom trousers caught on in the 1960s, you re not going to get that out of any serious piece of social science. We have a science says there are these things which are called memes, and we ve got no principal account of how to say what a unit of culture is. Well, take your pick.