 Alleles cannot cooperate with each other, only compete. That is where the “selfish” in “selfish gene” comes in. According to Dawkins (1976: 95), the selfish gene is not just one physical bit of DNA. It is “all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world” (for a recent defense of a similar approach, see Haig 2012). Hence, genes do not form classes of spatiotemporally unrelated individuals but trees. They must be replicas. But, being a replica is not enough. The linear repetition of the “same gene” in the form of several hundred copies is quite common. These replicas, however, do not reside at the same locus. Although identical in structure, these genes do not compete with each other in the way that alleles at the same locus can. In the simplest and most basic sense, alleles compete with alternative alleles at the same locus. Any other sorts of competition and cooperation are merely extrapolations from this fundamental sense of allelic competition. Although genes may cooperate with each other in very complicated ways in embryological development, in replication they can be treated as “separate and distinct”. In development, the effects of genes blend. In replication, replicators do not blend.