  Template directed replication of nucleic acids is at the essence of all
living beings and a major milestone for any origin of life scenario. We here
present an idealized model of prebiotic sequence replication, where binary
polymers act as templates for their autocatalytic replication, thereby serving
as each others reactants and products in an intertwined molecular ecology. Our
model demonstrates how autocatalysis alters the qualitative and quantitative
system dynamics in counter-intuitive ways. Most notably, numerical simulations
reveal a very strong intrinsic selection mechanism that favours the appearance
of a few population structures with highly ordered and repetitive sequence
patterns when starting from a pool of monomers. We demonstrate both
analytically and through simulation how this "selection of the dullest" is
caused by continued symmetry breaking through random fluctuations in the
transient dynamics that are amplified by autocatalysis and eventually propagate
to the population level. The impact of these observations on related prebiotic
mathematical models is discussed.
