Autocatalytic networks could lie at the beginning of evolution

In his 1985 book Origins of Life, the inventive British physicist Freeman Dyson imagined two distinct routes for that event. Either replication came first, he said, or metabolism did. That’s to say, the earliest proto-organisms first figured out either how to fuel themselves or how to copy themselves. The latter ability is needed for natural selection to get any purchase. Once there is the potential for copying errors that alter the replicator’s fitness (its rate of replication relative to the others in the population), the fittest gain the upper hand.