  An important issue for the origins of life is ensuring the accurate
maintenance of information in replicating polymers in the face of inevitable
errors. Here, we investigated how this maintenance depends on reaction kinetics
by incorporating the elementary steps of polymerization into the population
dynamics of polymers. We found that template-directed polymerization entails an
inherent error-correction mechanism akin to kinetic proofreading, generating
long polymers that are more tolerant to an error catastrophe. Because this
mechanism does not require enzymes, it is likely to operate under broad
prebiotic conditions.
