In 1972, Dr. Susumu Ohno, writing in the Brookhaven Symposium on Biology in the article “So Much ‘Junk DNA’ in our Genome” is credited with originating the term.

As Ohno pointed out, gene duplication can alleviate the constraint imposed by natural selection on changes to important gene regions by allowing one copy to maintain the original function as the other undergoes mutation. Rarely, these mutations will turn out to be beneficial, and a new gene may arise.