>Assuming you acknowledge the existence of ideas, a better question would be "is meme theory a useful or accurate model of how ideas behave?" I think the answe

>Assuming you acknowledge the existence of ideas, a better question would be "is meme theory a useful or accurate model of how ideas behave?" I think the answer to that would have been no as of 2005 (http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2005/vol9/edmonds_b.html http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2005/vol9/edmonds_b.html), but I haven't been following since then so there could have been advances made. I have a hopefully close friend who is much smarter than me whose field of study is memetics, so I am certainly not going to chuck out the theory for personal reasons as well as a natural cautiousness around ideas I don't really understand. I think it's important that they bring up Dennett specifically, who has strong opinions about consciousness and intentionality that appear on a surface reading like they might conflict with his take on memetic theory (http://www.consciousentities.com/alternatives.htm#memes http://www.consciousentities.com/alternatives.htm#memes).