One of the weird things about genetics is that it encompasses both the abstract and the concrete. The formal and physical. You can talk to a geneticist who is mostly interested in details of molecular mechanisms, and is steeped in structural biology. For these people genes are specific and material things. In contrast there are other geneticists who focus more on genes as units of analysis. In this case genes are semantic labels for the mediators within an intersection of phenomena. Recall that genetics predates the knowledge of its concrete substrate by 50 years! By the 1920s Mendelian genetics had been fused with evolutionary biology to create a systematic framework in which we could understand the patterns of inheritance across the generations. In the 1950s the DNA revolution was upon us, but as W. D. Hamilton recalls this had only a minimal impact on the evolutionary genetic thinkers of the era. With the Lewontin and Hubby allozyme paper in the mid-1960s this sort of benign disciplinary evasion was no longer possible; the field of molecular evolution came into its own.*
Today with genomics these human-imposed artificialities are fading away. Consider the concept of genetic recombination. Originally an …