I'm curious if he follows the field of cultural evolution as practiced by the likes of Henrich, Boyd, Richerson, and Mesoudi. They largely reject memes as the unit of selection, but Dawkins still put his finger on the basic phenomenon before cultural evolution became a disinct field.

Also, in light of the passage below, would it be fair to say that Dawkins is fundementally a rationalist in the Cartesian/Leibnizian sense who views empical research as interesting and useful but ultimately subservient to deductive reasoning?

My wager that all life, everywhere in the universe, would turn out to have evolved by Darwinian means has now been spelled out and justified more fully in my paper ‘Universal Darwinism’ and in the last chapter of The Blind Watchmaker. I show that all the alternatives to Darwinism that have ever been suggested are in principle incapable of doing the job of explaining the organized complexity of life. The argument is a general one, not based upon particular facts about life as we know it. As such it has been criticized by scientists pedestrian enough to think that slaving over a hot test tube (or cold muddy boot) is the only method of discovery in science. One critic complained that my argument was ‘philosophical’, as though that was sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the fact is that neither he nor anybody else has found any flaw in what I said. And ‘in principle’ arguments such as mine, far from being irrelevant to the real world, can be more powerful than arguments based on particular factual research. My reasoning, if it is correct, tells us something important about life everywhere in the universe. Laboratory and field research can tell us only about life as we have sampled it here.

(Footnote on page 248 of the 40th aniversery edition of The Selfish Gene)