 As mentioned earlier, two major influences led to the emphasis on replication as a necessary condition for evolution via natural selection: the influence of the replicator framework and the discovery of the molecular basis of genetic inheritance, in particular DNA replication. In their 1953 paper on the structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick famously noted that the properties of the double helix structure suggest a straightforward method for replicating the DNA sequence. It is now known that DNA replication is semiconservative: each of the strands of the double stranded DNA molecule is used as a template for constructing a complementary strand, and the replication process results in two DNA molecules, each containing one of the original strands and one newly constructed strand. In the absence of mutations, each of the new double stranded DNA molecules has the same sequence of base pairs (nucleotides) the original DNA molecule had. DNA replication explains how the information in the DNA sequence is copied, so that when the cell divides each daughter cell ends up with a complete copy of the original cell’s DNA. This is a critical element of genetic inheritance, though the genetic inheritance processes of mitosis and meiosis are far more involved than DNA replication, which is only one component of them.