Syd Lexia wrote:

Richard Dawkins basically pulled the word out of his ass. The terms "memetics" and "meme" were chosen because they sorta rhymes with "genetics" and "gene".

He hardly pulled it out of his ass. The memetics/genetics analogy is integral to the whole concept so it makes sense to choose a similar sounding word. And etymologically it derives either from "memory" or some Greek word like "μνημη" or "μιμος". I'd have to ask my sister to be sure however, I only took half a year of Greek before I gave up.

SydLexia wrote:

The whole idea of memetics is generally regarded as oversimplified garbage in the mainstream philosophical community anyway.

It's pretty popular among cognitive scientists. I don't know why exactly. It doesn't have any actual value in terms of research. The closest thing to an experimental approach I've ever heard about was at a cognitive science conference where a Japanese graduate student told me about his work on a computer simulation that was part of his PhD and supposed to model memetics on a small scale. I didn't really understand how he wanted to implement that because a) his English was hard to follow and b) he just sat down next to me during breakfast and started talking about memes and evolutionary models while I was trying to eat my cereal and cope with a hangover from the previous night.