Memes Suffer Lack of Rigor

Evolutionary biology has advanced in recent years in large part
because scientists have distinguished rigorously between phenotype and
genotype — between physical appearance and its biochemical basis. For
example, dwarfism may come about through any one of several genetic
mechanisms. An animal population undergoing selection for smaller size
might develop a predominance of any one of these genetic traits, or
several in parallel, or a bundle of them. Identifying the particular
genetic mechanism makes the rigorous and precise science of population
genetics possible.

Memetics, by contrast, has no such model for the storage and
transmission of memes. Memeticists typically assume that memetic
“phenotypes” equate with memetic “genotypes” — that every individual
believing in one god, for example, carries the same “monotheism meme”.
This assumption seems like a serious — and to critics, fatal — weakness
in memetics relative to its genetic model.

In response to these criticisms, memeticists might argue that as
their discipline does not construe memes as atomic entities, they
therefore parallel indirectly the entirety of existing evolutionary
taxonomy. (For example, one would not preclude fish from the animal
kingdom for their lack of lungs.)

The author Evan Louis Sheehan, on the other hand, does portray memes
as particulate (atomic-like) entities, captured in cortical hierarchies
identical to what Jeff Hawkins proposes in his book On Intelligence.
Each hierarchy expresses a pattern that the brain-owner has sensed and
remembered. “Sensed patterns” can reflect anything from the shape of a
tree to a commonly performed pattern of behavior that routinely
propagates through mimicry. A cortical hierarchy consists of a
“molecular” entity, constructed from sub-hierarchies, which are
themselves ultimately constructed from atomic entities — sensory
elements. Sheehan, in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated
Intelligence builds a model of creative thinking around a Darwinian
process of combining and recombining various causal memes.