Natural genetic engineering (NGE) is a class of process proposed by molecular biologist James Shapiro to account for novelty created in the course of biological evolution. Shapiro developed this work in several peer-reviewed publications and later in his book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. He uses NGE to account for several proposed counterexamples to the central dogma of molecular biology (the subsequently partly rejected proposal of 1970 that the direction of the flow of sequence information is only from DNA to DNA or DNA to RNA to proteins, and never the reverse). Shapiro drew from work as diverse as the adaptivity of the mammalian immune system, ciliate macronuclei and epigenetics. The work gained some measure of notoriety after being championed by proponents of Intelligent D