<P> Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes . Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt . Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex . As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained . Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex . Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law . This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo . </P> <P> The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid-1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme . Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics . Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas . </P> <P> Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology . Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory . This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors . </P> <P> An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene / meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection - pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation - rates . There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes . </P>

Where is the is this a meme from