Primordial sex facilitates the emergence of evolution.

Abstract

Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, and they have very likely played a crucial role at the origin of life. Here we assume that a protocell, which is a compartment enclosing functional components, requires <i>N</i> such components in order to be evolvable. We calculate the timescale in which a minimal evolvable protocell is produced. We show that when protocells fuse and share information, the timescales polynomially in <i>N</i> By contrast, in the absence of fusion, the worst-case scenario is exponential in <i>N</i> We discuss the implications of this result for the origin of life and other biological processes.