Self-replicating systems have a central role in the transition from chemistry to biology. While there are several chemical systems showing self-replication , the question of how evolvable such systems are remains largely unanswered. Evolvability requires a balanced level of fidelity (degree of replication exactness), where mutation rates should be sufficiently high to allow an adequate exploration of evolutionary space, yet not too high, so that replicator identity and population structure can be maintained . In extant life the replication of DNA occurs with very few errors. For example, E. Coli can replicate its genome with an error rate as low as 1 in every 10 9 nucleotides . Such a low error rate is achieved by complex and highly evolved replication and error-correction machineries, without which the error rates are much higher. For example, for the templatemediated synthesis of RNA in the absence of such machinery, error rates have been estimated to be as high as 0.35 . For synthetic replicators error rates are largely unknown, but unlikely to be significantly better.