Richard Dawkins, even since writing a book titled "The Selfish Gene" has been a proponent of memes as a form of social evolution.

A meme has no physical existence and is just ideas, practices or symbols transmitted in some sort of viral manner from person to person, community to community.

It is a clever idea that through interaction with others societies adapt, evolve and change, exchanging ideas, transmitting knowledge and adapting to other changes. And on paper it all sounds great.

From Wikipedia:

Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner similar to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

Following such "memetic evolution", knowledge can grow and adapt adapt as each generation of the connoseurs of knowledge do not need to rediscover what the last generation did. People can "stand on the shoulder of giants".

This can be even further from simple technology - if one person knows how to make (say) a weapon (like a gun or other firearm), others do not need to have that same knowledge. They only need to know how to use it. If you own a gun, it does not mean you know how to craft one, or how to make the bullets or gunpowder or anything else that may be needed in providing you with a fully functional firearm.

That can be considered a form of memetic evolution and it all seems to work well. Even the next step - using a weapon can be made to fit this theory - in an otherwise equal confrontation the person with superior skill and weaponry is the one most likely to have the upper hand.

However, so far none of this involves humans and humanity and this is where it all falls apart. Emotion and experience are things that cannot be transferred from one individual to another without going through the same situations.

While technology can be improved on a generational basis, emotions and experience cannot - they start from scratch with each generation - nay, they start from scratch within every single individual.

In other words, if in some fantasticallu utopian future (some) people (somehow) managed to learn tolerance, forgiveness and gain complete control over their emotions, such "knowledge" will not be transferred onto others or onto the next generation, not even their own offspring.

Going back to the analogy of the gun, if one person manages to learn how to control his rage and not fire the gun at the person being confronted, that level control of emotion will not be something that will be passed onto others - when faced with a similar situation, others - even offspring - may not show the same control - in essence the emotional control and experience is "lost" as it cannot be transferred.

Each person has to learn for him or her self.

The actual "hidden example" above is not the gun analogy, but anger (and can be extended to anything that involves emotion or carries emotional baggage, which is most things in life). Just because someone else has learnt how to control anger does not mean you have learnt to control it. If you do learn to control it, that does not mean your kids will.

When taking this into account, memetics and "social evolution" seems cobblers to me - utopian fantasy that can exist in a Star Trek movie, but not in the real world.