The scientific method offers a body of social and experimental
techniques which, given certain preconditions — a free press for the
circulation of information, a large number of people predisposed to see
the world as a mechanism subject to general regularities which humans
can observe, describe and model through repeatable experiments and/or
observations — acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an
educated population as journals circulate and blogs proliferate. By
demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice
can make itself more attractive to potential converts. Whether or not
experimenters can necessarily verify them, ideas and attitudes — those
which scientists tend to hold or those which feel aesthetically
pleasing in combination with scientific discoveries — can propagate
themselves in societies where science has a high status by the process
of meme piggybacking.
Furthermore, one can view the scientific method as a successful
meta-memetical means of selecting those memeplexes best suited for
explaining observable physical processes, through its mechanism
(parallel to the evolutionary algorithm used in computer science) of
providing standardized methods for creating and evaluating competing
populations of solutions to a given problem.
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