Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

The very fact that genes consist of short, periodically repeating oligonucleotides could be an effective defense against the frequent occurrence of termination codons in longer DNA sections.If we have a computer create a population of 300 nucleotide-long DNA chains, each of them with a random sequence, then only 0.82% of the chains will not contain a termination codon, and will thus encode a continuous protein with a length of 100 aminoacids.However, in contrast, if we create a similar sequence by first having the computer create a random decanucleotide and this is left to repeat 30x in tandem, then the fraction of chains not containing any termination codon will equal about 60% (Ohno 1984a).

            If it is assumed that the sequence of the original genes originated by random inclusion of nucleotides, then it can be expected that only chains formed by tandem reproduction of short nucleotide motifs, which exhibit internal periodicity, would be able to encode sufficiently long protein chains and could thus have led to the formation of present-day genes.