Genes Are Things You Have Whether You Want Them or Not
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The statement we have chosen as the title for this paper is that of an unidentified elementary-school child quoted in an article (“Digestion is best accomplished on an empty stomach; original views on health from kids”) appearing in the April 1979 issue of Self magazine. It neatly summarizes a notion recently elaborated in detail by Orgel and Crick (1980) and by us (Doolittle and Sapienza 1980), which was alluded to earlier by Dawkins (1976), Bodmer (see Walker 1978), and Crick (1979) and which we suspect has lain dormant in the minds of many molecular biologists and evolutionary theorists for several years without being articulated explicitly.
That notion, which follows logically from a consideration of the essential natures of natural selection, nucleic acids, and organisms, is this: Natural selection operates on any entities capable of self-replication and heritable variation to produce descendants more fit for survival within their environments. Nucleic acids...
