Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution
Abstract
Natural selection operating within genomes will inevitably result in the appearance of DNAs with no phenotypic expression whose only `function' is survival within genomes. Prokaryotic transposable elements and eukaryotic middle-repetitive sequences can be seen as such DNAs, and thus no phenotypic or evolutionary function need be assigned to them.
- Publication:
-
Nature
- Pub Date:
- April 1980
- DOI:
- 10.1038/284601a0
- Bibcode:
- 1980Natur.284..601D