  Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance
stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we
assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components,
requires $N$ components to be evolvable. We take interest in the timescale in
which a minimal evolvable protocell is produced. We show that when protocells
fuse and share information, the time to produce an evolvable protocell scales
algebraically in $N$, in contrast to an exponential scaling in the absence of
fusion. We discuss the implications of this result for origins of life, as well
as other biological processes.
