Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach to the Population Dynamics of Early Replicators

The population dynamics of early replicators has revealed numerous puzzles, highlighting the difficulty of transitioning from simple template-directed replicating molecules to complex biological systems. The resolution of these puzzles has set the research agenda on prebiotic evolution since the seminal works of Manfred Eigen in the 1970s. Here, we study the effects of demographic noise on the population dynamics of template-directed (non-enzymatic) and protein-mediated (enzymatic) replicators. We borrow stochastic algorithms from evolutionary game theory to simulate finite populations of two types of replicators. These algorithms recover the replicator equation framework in the infinite population limit. For large but finite populations, we use finite-size scaling to determine the probability of fixation and the mean time to fixation near a threshold that delimits the regions of dominance of each replicator type. Since enzyme-producing replicators cannot evolve in a well-mixed population containing replicators that benefit from the enzyme but do not encode it, we study the evolution of enzyme-producing replicators in a finite population structured in temporarily formed random groups of fixed size <i>n</i>. We argue that this problem is identical to the weak-altruism version of the <i>n</i>-player prisoner's dilemma, and show that the threshold is given by the condition that the reward for altruistic behavior is equal to its cost.