The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, Dawkins, 2024
"Our entire genome - more, the entire gene pool of any species of animal - is a swarming colony of symbiotic verticoviruses. Once again, I'm not talking only about the 8 percent of our genome that consists of actual retroviruses, but the other 92 percent as well. They are good companions precisely beause they are vertically transmitted, and have been for countless generations. This is the radical conclusion towards which this chapter has been directed. The gene pool of a species, including our own, is a gigantic colony of viruses, each hell-bent on travelling to the future. They cooperate with one another in the enterprise of building bodies because successive, temporary, reproduce-and-then-die bodies have proved to be the best vehicles in which to undertake their vertical Great Trek through time. You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-traveling cooperative of viruses."
So ends this wonderful tour of all genetic stuff's self-documentation. This last insight is that our species, and every species to have ever existed, is the result of the transmission of a cooperative of viruses: genes. This builds on or reframes his view of the selfish gene as a virus. The gene's millenia-long run of it is due to its, to Dawkins, literal virality.