Dawkins' definition of virality seems to be ever-shifting. At the end he defines science as a meme but not a virus by saying that virus requires "spread me" to

Dawkins' definition of virality seems to be ever-shifting. At the end he defines science as a meme but not a virus by saying that virus requires "spread me" to be baked into it. If this is the case, however, then "mystery is a virtue" is not viral as he claims earlier. Neither is wearing baseball caps backwards, for that matter. Additionally, most scientific organizations and universities include an element of spreading their methods, so they too have a "viral" component. When Dawkins claims that the fact that "the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious" makes it non-viral, I get the sneaking feeling that whether or not something is a virus depends heavily on how Dawkins feels about it.