Fig. 4

a Schematic depiction of key genomic elements from the ancestral organism (top) and representative organisms from H0–H3 peaks obtained from simulations at the high mutation rate (see Fig. 1b). The copy-loop is the first point of difference between these sequences. H0 genotypes have a copy-loop devoid of the ancestral copying functionality. Some of the sample sequences from each of these peaks are given in Additional file 1: Fig. S14. The fitness ranges used to isolate these peaks are given in Additional file 1: Table S2. b Box plots depicting merits (speed of the organism’s virtual CPU, a proxy for metabolic activity of the genotype) of 100 genotypes sampled from each of H0–H3 on the fitness distribution of simulations performed at a high mutation rate (statistical significance measured using the non-parametric Wilcoxon test). c Task complexities for genomes (estimated roughly by the number of “NAND” instructions required to perform a task, increases from left to right) from H0–H3 on the fitness distribution obtained from simulations at high mutation rate. The Y axis represents the number of times that a genotype belonging to these peaks performs a task over a single execution of the genome. Note that peak H3 does not perform any of the metabolic tasks but instead relies on a vastly improved replicative machinery (four h-copy per cycle) to acquire a very high fitness. The data for this figure is also given in Additional file 1: Table S3