Very nice way of putting things together. This post really makes me thinking. At the end, life can be seen as a capacity of transferring genes in one way or the other. Is this the message you tried to convey?

If we look at this from a different view, we can say that genes move “horizontally” to fulfil their own selfish interests

I have troubles with that sentence… It is a bit too philosophical for me as it yields to the notion of consciousness, but at the level of the genes. This is something, without working in this area, I can’t buy :)