The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics.
Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in more established fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. Memetics thus remains a science in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.