Do you think memetics will ever be a field of hard science?
It is implied, by way of connotation, that only physical phenomena are “real” and therefore amenable to “hard” science, while everything in the social, cultural or historical sphere is, by comparison, “unreal” and consisting of “pseudo” phenomena, and hence beyond the reach of “hard” science. It is further implied that the attempt to understand these phenomena scientifically is doomed at the outset and should therefore regarded as “pseudoscience,” or a form of imposture. Being a social scientist, I naturally think this is an unfairly narrow and counterproductive judgment on my profession. Simply because you can not determine the chemical structure and composition of a meme, does not mean that memes and meme-comlexes do not exist. In fact, one could say that the materialistic reductionistic empiricism that denigrates memetics is itself a meme-plex–a self-sustaining complex of mutually reinforcing ideas that perpetuates itself through time–or, if you prefer, a kind of idea-limiting vir
