  One of the leading theories for the origin of life includes the hypothesis
according to which life would have evolved as cooperative networks of
molecules. Explaining cooperation$-$and particularly, its emergence in favoring
the evolution of life-bearing molecules$-$is thus a key element in describing
the transition from nonlife to life. Using agent-based modeling of the iterated
prisoner's dilemma, we investigate the emergence of cooperative behavior in a
stochastic and spatially extended setting and characterize the effects of
inheritance and variability. We demonstrate that there is a mutation threshold
above which cooperation is$-$counterintuitively$-$selected, which drives a
dramatic and robust cooperative takeover of the whole system sustained
consistently up to the error catastrophe, in a manner reminiscent of typical
phase transition phenomena in statistical physics. Moreover, our results also
imply that one of the simplest conditional cooperative strategies,
"Tit-for-Tat", plays a key role in the emergence of cooperative behavior
required for the origin of life.
