This sort of reduction is called ontological reduction . Those who accept this form of reductionism are called 'physicalists'. This is the view that the properties of one level must be ideally explained as the effects of processes at the next level down. Many Mendelian genes are made from many DNA molecules, and many populational traits are coded for by many Mendlian genes. Simple reduction will not work.
Reduction enters the evolutionary debate in the form of the issue of group selection .
The way Dawkins put it, as evidenced by the title The Selfish Gene, was wrongly interpreted to mean that organisms are irrelevant. This puts the lie to simplistic notions that evolution is defined as a change in allele frequencies. That is what has been called by Wimsatt the 'bookkeeping' definition of evolution, and it is true as far as it goes, but it is not all that is interesting about evolution. Several have followed Wynne-Edwards on this. Recent versions, though, have moved from the notion that groups are selected , though, in favour of the view that they are sorted , because selection requires that the entity in question replicates, and does so differentially relative to other contenders.