![]() ![]() ![]() There is often a rhythm and a rhyme to these gene migrations. Twenty-five years after the book’s publication, the biggest discovery of the Human Genome Project was that half of our genome is indeed plastered with a plethora of such selfish elements, including a million short interspersed elements (SINEs), which are parasites of genomic parasites. The most striking example may be Dawkins’ prediction of a phenomenon that turned out to be of truly genomic proportions: the existence of purely selfish DNA, genes that have no function other than to propagate themselves in the genome, for example, by copying and pasting themselves in a number of different chromosomes in our own genome and those of most walks of life. But what is a gene, anyway? When we interviewed Dawkins last November, he described his pragmatic definition of a gene in the Mendelian sense: “it’s what persists through the generations.” Remarkably, when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, no genome sequence had yet been fully deciphered yet this did not stop him from deducing the genes’ workings at the genomic level. ![]()
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