This is from a (more than a year old) TLS article I’ve just read:

“…no significant body of empirical research has grown up around the meme concept… nor has memetics made empirically testable propositions or generated much in the way of experimental or observational data. In fact the memetic literature remains devoted almost exclusively to theoretical antagonisms, internecine battles, and scholastic elucidations of prior writing on memes. This is typically the sign of a science in search of a subject matter.”

(The biologist Robert Aunger)