Comment 13 by Schrodinger's Cat

But literalist is what the meme theory has to be if it interacts with matter at all. The reason a man can call someone a Muslim is that they hold ideas they've inherited or tick a few boxes of criteria in the observer's head. But this still says nothing about whether the ideas or even meta-ideas are replicating entities. If anything, it's turning into a distraction from the point of memetics in the first place, which is that ideas are replicated. A meta-idea is simply invoking a genome to do a gene's job, so it actually makes the problem worse. How would you show that the meta-idea has replicated, not just endured? At present, it's wordplay.

Some ideas get passed on, like the label of Christianity, but even to say it's "passed on", as though the idea was physically jumping from head to head, is stretching the term a bit, and that's my point.