More irony: the author is attempting to proliferate the meme that "memes are a myth" - presumably to defend some sacred belief system that memetic analysis undermines.
Memetic analysis would not undermine it, it would explain it ;) But I guess explanation kills the magic. In any case, I agree with you, 'deniers' of memetics tend to be more spiritual/religious. Again, memetics would explain the denial as well: making/breaking neural patterns is no easy task.
Some deliciously irony:
> Since its introduction almost 40 years ago, the term has taken root in science, language, and popular culture.
> Should we take the existence of memes on scientific faith, or countenance the parsimonious explanation that ideas are just ideas that we use for better or for worse?
> There is no reason to invent a language or a science, or insert some entirely fictitious evolutionary notion, every time we have a question that seems unanswerable.
> It sounds nice, and perhaps the meme is a useful analogy—but it is just an analogy.
Dennet's favourite examples of memes are words. They're clearly "physically real", in that we can capture them with a microphone or a pen. We're nowhere near able to measure the neurological effect of a word on a brain, but we certainly know that the effect is there, since hearing words (eg. instructions) can alter our behaviour.