not refer to repetitive DNA as “non- 
adaptive,” for although it may not be 
helping bodies, it is acting as its own 
Darwinian agent. I can’t think of a 
much better term in a language replete 
with anthropocentric terms, but how 
about “self-centered DNA” — without 
the opprobrious overtones that “selfish” 
inevitably contains. 
Another argument against the use of 
selfish DNA lies in its historical source: 
Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish 
Gene (1976). Dawkins argued that bod- 
ies are the wrong level of evolutionary 
analysis and that all evolution is nothing 
but a struggle among genes. Bodies are 
merely temporary containers for their 
selfish genes. Superficially, this looks 
like selfish DNA writ larger, hence 
Orgel and Crick’s decision to borrow the 
term. In fact, the theories of selfish 
genes and selfish DNA could not be 
more different in the structures of expla- 
nation that nurture them. 
Dawkins writes as a superstrict mod- 
ern Darwinian, committed to the idea 
that all features must be interpreted as 
adaptations and that all of evolution is a 
struggle for existence among individuals 
at the lowest level. He merely decided 
that Darwinians weren't radical enough 
in reducing such higher-level reveries as 
“the good of the species” or “the har- 
mony of nature” to the unrestrained 
struggle of individuals. The struggling 
items are one level lower — genes rather 
than bodies — and the Darwinian pro- 
gram of reduction can go even further 
than modern supporters had dared to 
hope. 
Selfish DNA, on the other hand, 
gains its rationale from the anti- 
reductionistic belief that evolution 
works on a hierarchy of legitimate levels 
that cannot be collapsed to the first rung 
of the scale. Dawkins's selfish genes 
increase in frequency because they have 
effects upon bodies, aiding them in their 
struggle for existence. Selfish DNA in- 
creases in frequency for precisely the 
opposite reason — because it initially has 
no effect on bodies and therefore is not 
suppressed at this legitimate higher 
level. Dawkins’s theory is an unconven- 
tional proposal to explain ordinary adap- 
tation of bodies. Selfish DNA survives 
only because it makes no difference to 
bodies. 
The idea of selfish genes is, in my 
opinion, fundamentally incorrect (how- 
ever stimulating) because the features 
of bodies that make a difference in 
natural selection cannot be decomposed 
into products of individual genes. Each 
gene contributes to several features and 
each feature is built by several genes 
and their complex interactions. When a 
body survives because natural selection 
has favored a set of features, selection 
has touched so many genes in so many 
complex and unbreakable connections 
that the idea of individual genes battling 
for personal survival makes no sense. 
(See my column of December 1977, but 
see especially the critique of Dawkins by 
evolution’s grandest old man, Sewall 
Wright — 92 and still going strong — in 
Evolution , vol. 34, 1980, pp. 825-43.) 
But selfish DNA can spread because it 
makes no features in bodies. It may be 
adaptive at its own level, but it is invis- 
ible and nonadaptive at the level of 
natural selection among bodies. Hence 
it may accumulate at first because natu- 
u 
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