How the drive for Survival of the Fittest might have arisen from a physico-chemical ratcheting process*

It is not known how life originated, but it must have roughly coincided with the origin of the Survival of the Fittest (SoF). SoF is the dynamics of growth, innovation, persistence, and variation that is at the heart of biology.  In SoF, cells that are better at converting food to ATP energy and biomass replicate faster and grow in population.  We seek the roots of SoF in prebiotic physical chemistry of simple molecules.  A physico-chemical mechanism that could have presaged SoF is that the better a catalyst is at producing an action, the more that action results in duplicating the catalyst itself.  Proteins are today's biological catalysts.  We develop dynamical modeling that describes how SoF dynamics might have arisen from the earliest simple random processes of peptide synthesis.