Now go back to our population of replicators, and see what the effect of erratic copying will be. Obviously, instead of there being a uniform population of identical replicators, we shall have a mixed population. Probably many of the products of erratic copying will be found to have lost the property of self-replication that their 'parent' had. But a few will retain the property of self-replication, while being different from the parent in some other respect. So we shall have copies of errors being duplicated in the population.
When you read the word 'error', banish from your mind all pejorative associations. It simply means an error from the point of view of high-fidelity copying. It is possible for an error to result in an improvement. I dare say many an exquisite new dish has been created because a cook made a mistake while trying to follow a recipe. Insofar as I can claim to have had any original scientific ideas, these have sometimes been misunderstandings, or misreadings, of other peoples' ideas. To return to our primeval replicators, while most miscopyings probably resulted in diminished copying effectiveness, or total loss of the self-eopying property, a few might actually have turned out to be better at self-replication than the parent replicator that gave rise to them.
