Not to be confused with the book The Selfish Gene.

Selfish DNA is a term for sequences of DNA that sensu stricto have two distinct properties:

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins suggested the idea of selfish DNA in reaction to the then fairly new revelation of the large proportion of noncoding DNA in eukaryotic genomes. In 1980, two articles in the journal Nature expanded and discussed the concept. According to one of these articles: