Culture- Inception and its Transmission

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Godwin's law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies)^[1][2] is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin in 1989 which has become an Internet adage. It states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
It says:

Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.^[2]

Godwin's law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons.

Reading this, I started digging Memetics link y'da, as I found this whole study of culture and its transmission bloody fascinating... (There was this documentary on the evolution of culture, showing how it might form, in say, Chimpanzees, showing with an example, where their food is kept inside a cage, not readily accessible, but need to find some way to access it.. and they are outside.. and how one smart 'chap' chimp finds a way to get the food out, and in no time, others star to copy the exact same idea, in exact same way, by using a stick, in certain angle to push, and hold the body in certain way to collect the food falling from a container.. and it became part of their 'culture' ;)

 

 It seems this whole Memetics business is trying to define and quantify something, to analyse it and "make it a science" though, I feel quite strongly that, one of the important factors in culture and its "internalisation", "assimilation" and "transmission", must have something to do with Feelings and Emotions!.. and they don't talk a word of it.

 

May be, Evolutionary Psychology, is more appropriate a zone to talk about what they are trying to define with Memetics ??

 

No Wonder, then, that it didn't really take off!, (after 25 years! into attempted inception into.. a 'new realm of Science'?)

 

[Quote From the section about Maturity (of Memetics as a new 'science')]

-->In 2005, the Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission ceased publication and published a set of articles on the future of memetics. The website states that although "there was to be a relaunch...after several years nothing has happened".^[7]

 

Nevertheless, I found THIS para from that section very interesting: 

-->

Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators in the sense as defined by Dawkins.^[8] That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are copied with variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Only some of the variants can survive. The combination of these three elements (copies; variation; competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. 

Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, ormemeplexes. In her definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires braincapacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model. Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutationrate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an order emerges to create culture.

And with my perception of the world, and limited knowledge, I tend to side with these to people in the Criticism section below! (in the sense, some of it were the thoughts in my mind when reading the rest of the stuff about the topic of Memetic;) 

Criticism

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution" among other things. As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.^[9]

Another criticism comes from semiotics, (e.g., Deacon,^[10] Kull^[11]) stating that the concept of meme is a primitivized concept of Sign. Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign without its triadic nature. In other words, meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

Mary Midgley criticises memetics for at least two reasons: One, culture is not best understood by examining its smallest parts, as culture is pattern-like, comparable to a ocean current. Many more factors, historical and others, should be taken into account than only whatever particle culture is built from. Two, if memes are not thoughts (and thus not cognitive phenomena), as Daniel C. Dennett insists in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", what, then, are they? What ontological status do they have? Do they, as memeticists (who are alsoreductionists) insist, in fact exist?