 Notice that this argument begins by admitting that groups can function as interactors, and even that group selection may effectively produce group-level adaptations. The argument that groups should not be considered real units of selection amounts to the claim that the groups are not the ultimate beneficiaries. To counteract the intuition that the groups do, of course, benefit, in some sense, from the adaptations, the terms “fundamentally” and “basic” are used, thus signaling what the author considers the most important level. Even if a group-level trait is affecting a change in gene frequencies, “it is still genes that are regarded as the replicators which actually survive (or fail to survive) as a consequence of the (vehicle) selection process” (Dawkins 1982b: 115). Thus, the replicator is the unit of selection because it is the beneficiary, and the real owner, of all adaptations that exist.