Not only did he find deadly competition between the sexes even in their most intimate moments, but he proposed that our genomes contain many stretches of DNA (often subsumed under the label “junk DNA”) that are truly “selfish” in the sense that they have discovered ways to spread and persist without contributing to organismal fitness. At times, this means encoding actions that are diametrically opposed to those of the majority of genes. As a consequence, most organisms are not completely harmonious wholes and the individual is, in fact, divisible.
