What about the entire history of linguistics? Cultural anthropology?
Evolutionary psychology? Memetics is an explanatory theory, a point of
view from which to examine these data, just the way genetic evolution is
a way of looking at and explaining the data of biology and paleontology.
I agree that little or none of the linguistic research to date has been
done from this point of view, but it would be a good exercise. For
example, it would be interesting to compare a linguistic map's pattern
of isoglosses to an epidemiologist's map of some competing pathogens.
Has anyone heard of such a study?
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC