What exactly do you mean by being “rigorous about them”?
Some seemingly ‘rigorous’ ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
Archaeologists studying the dissemination of arrowhead technology
Linguists studying the geographic distribution of phonemes among dialects of a language
Biblical studies
Etymology
It’s not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.
What exactly do you mean by being “rigorous about them”?
Some seemingly ‘rigorous’ ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
Archaeologists studying the dissemination of arrowhead technology
Linguists studying the geographic distribution of phonemes among dialects of a language
Biblical studies
Etymology
It’s not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.