Property:Abstract
From Origins
This is a property of type Text.
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At the start of life, the origin of a primitive genome required individ-
ual replicators, or genes, to act like enzymes and cooperatively copy each
other. The evolutionary stability of such enzymatic cooperation poses a
problem, because it would have been susceptible to parasitic replicators,
that don't act like enzymes, but could still bene�t from the enzymatic
behaviour of other replicators. Existing hypotheses to solve this problem
require restrictive assumptions that may not be justi�ed, such as the evo-
lution of a cell membrane before the evolution of enzymatic cooperation.
We show theoretically that, instead, selection itself can lead to replicators
grouping themselves together in a way that favours cooperation. We show
that the tendency to physically associate to others and cooperative enzy-
matic activity can coevolve, leading to the evolution of physically linked
cooperative replicators. Our results shift the empirical problem from a
search for special environmental conditions to questions about what types
of phenotypes can be produced by simple replicators. +