Aunger (2000) and Edmonds (2002) argue that memetics is a theory without a methodology, in imminent danger of dying from lack of novel interpretations and empirical work. Edmonds challenges memeticists to conduct empirical tests. This article presents Competing Memes Analysis, an empirical methodology that can readily be applied to significant social problems. The methodology is implemented in three steps. Step 1 identifies the organization of memes within an activity. Each activity is assumed to exhibit numerous small groups of memes where each meme within a group competes with all other memes in the group and can be combined with any meme from any other group. The succession of memes that occurs with increasing experience can be a powerful clue to identifying competing memes. Step 2 collects records of activities and codes them for the presence or absence of each meme identified in Step 1. Any activity that people acquire from each other by imitation can be readily coded for the presence or absence of competing memes. Step 3 analyzes changing frequencies of each coded meme over time or space. Models of these changes can give useful clues to suggest empirical studies that will provide important social and scientific results. Ecology’s Lotka-Volterra model of competing species illustrates the usefulness to memetics of population models.

Journal of Memetics

Paul R. Ehrlich, Simon A. Levin^*

Over the past century and a half, we have
made enormous progress in assembling a coherent picture of genetic
evolution?that is, changes in the pools of genetic information
possessed by populations, the genetic differentiation of populations
(speciation) (see summaries in [1,2]), and the application of that understanding to the physical evolution of Homo sapiens and its forebears ([3]; e.g., [4,5]).
But human beings, in addition to being products of biological
evolution, are?vastly more than any other organisms?also products of a
process of ?cultural evolution.? Cultural evolution consists of changes
in the nongenetic information stored in brains, stories, songs, books,
computer disks, and the like. Despite some important first steps, no
integrated picture of the process of cultural evolution that has the
explanatory power of the theory of genetic evolution has yet emerged.

Much of the effort to examine cultural evolution has focused on interactions of the genetic and cultural processes (e.g., [6], see also references in [7]).
This focus, however, provides a sometimes misleading perspective, since
most of the behavior of our species that is of interest to policy
makers is a product of the portion of cultural evolution [8]
that occurs so rapidly that genetic change is irrelevant. There is a
long-recognized need both to understand the process of human cultural
evolution per se and to find ways of altering its course (an operation
in which institutions as diverse as schools, prisons, and governments
have long been engaged). In a world threatened by weapons of mass
destruction and escalating environmental deterioration, the need to
change our behavior to avoid a global collapse [9]
has become urgent. A clear understanding of how cultural changes
interact with individual actions is central to informing democratically
and humanely guided efforts to influence cultural evolution. While most
of the effort to understand that evolution has come from the social
sciences, biologists have also struggled with the issue (e.g., p. 285
of [10], [11?16], and p. 62 of [17]).
We argue that biologists and social scientists need one another and
must collectively direct more of their attention to understanding how
social norms develop and change. Therefore, we offer this review of the
challenge in order to emphasize its multidisciplinary dimensions and
thereby to recruit a broader mixture of scientists into a more
integrated effort to develop a theory of change in social norms?and,
eventually, cultural evolution as a whole.

PLoS Biology