What is a gene?
So what is a gene? / The Psychologist / 2016.
"So if genes only came later, what, then, is their true role? Emphatically not, it seems, as the “original” recipes, designers and controllers of life, at all. More likely as templates for molecular components needed regularly by the already living thing: a kind of facility for “just in time” production of parts needed on a recurring basis."