Stretches of DNA are useless gibberish, there the code describes no protein.  Jumping genes so called because they are preceded by a code that says, Jump over what's next.  "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." "You can skip this part."  But what's striking is that, for whatever evolutionary reason, these genes are there, they are included, faithfully copied in replication as if senselessness, as if all that was excluded from our metabolic logic is still a vital ingredient of our makeup. Molecular gerontologists are convinced that our cells are hardwired for mortality: there's also something in our makeup that includes its own negation, its own destruction. That's why poetry is about death. Perhaps our being in its wholeness requires demise, requires crossing out.   

--Dean  Young (from The Art of Recklessness; 2012)