Memes?

Good catch, thanks! That plot is indeed very weak.

But if we're charitable enough to ignore the plot and related argument, the article still makes a good argument. Given that the journal shut down for lack of quality submissions, I think it's fair to say that if the field is not dead, it's definitely resting.

Ok, more seriously: people are using memetics-like ideas, sometimes under different names, in other fields and publishing in other journals.

WTH? Who claims that an obvious decade-long trend has ended and reversed based on one or two years' data?

Memetics consists of terminology and framework for cultural evolution. Cultural evolution covers a lot of hypotheses. For instance there's the hypothesis that the human brain swelled up to accommodate memes or the hypothesis that memes made humans sociable - since they need social contact between their hosts in order for them to reproduce - or they hypothesis that memes were implicated in the high frequency of speciation among our ancestors - just as songbirds speciate frequently. There's quite a lot of associated hypotheses - no doubt some are correct and some are not.

Consider the question: "Where did that viral video come from - why that video and not another video?" - That's the colloquial use of meme, but it's not a very useful question because the answer often "Random chance at the intersection of timing and relevance."

Consider the different question "When did it become unacceptable for males to have intimate friendships with other men?" Looking at the source of that, including with other ideas supported its creation and continuance - is essentially the only useful aspect of analysis of memes.

"Idea" is not really a meme synonym. Ideas are not necessarily socially transmitted. The concept bundles individual learning and social learning together. Memes, by most conventional definitions, are to do with social learning. It is socially learned ideas that are most likely to result in open-ended adaptive evolution - since they have potentially large lifespans.

The reason is here.

I seem to remember more elaborate techniques that I think were trying to capture genetic drift and selection, but I can't find them at the moment.

A quick google along the lines of "mathematical model meme propagation" does tend to pop up quite a few models. Here are two that seemed interesting: http://cogprints.org/531/1/mav.htm and http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2000/vol4/kendal_jr&laland_kn.html

You are using a different definition of 'cultural information' than everyone else in the world. Genes code for proteins; proteins combined with other environmental factors cause traits to be exhibited.

Genes are the underlying mechanism by which genetic traits are transferable, just as 'memes' (original definition) are the mechanism by which ideas and ways of thought are transferable.

However, a meme (such as 'expected results inform present decisions') by itself is about as meaningful as a strand of RNA without a cell. An idea (such as Bayesian Rationality), on the other hand, is comparable to a protein (e.g. procollagen), in that the memes determine how the idea is expressed.

This seem to be a connotations problem. The words simply mean different things to us, and quite possibly yet a third unrelated one to the OP.

My connotation might be approximately summed up along the lines of "Ideas can change incrementally without a central authority in control"

At least to me, the fact that memes can be deliberately (ie non-randomly and intelligently) created and changed is enough to disprove the analogy.

Why is that? Genes can be deliberately engineered as well, albeit with greater difficulty.

I don't think that the analogy is intended to be that close. It is a bit hard to imagine that Dawkins failed to notice that memes can be deliberately created and changed. So whatever he intended, it must have been a sufficiently abstract analogy to allow for that.

Memetics is not simply the claim that ideas change over time; it is a more specific analogy to evolution, which is almost certainly false. At least to me, the fact that memes can be deliberately (ie non-randomly and intelligently) created and changed is enough to disprove the analogy.

Memetic engineering seems generally similar to genetic engineering. Memetic engineering doesn't disprove Darwinian cultural evolution any more that genetic engineering disproves Darwinian organic evolution.