Physicists have long viewed life as a non-equilibrium process that fights the 2nd law of thermodynamics by maintaining order. While we understand how extant biological Maxwell Demons work, much less is known about how such Demons come into existence in the first place. Using theoretical and experimental work on DNA copying machinery, we show that the commonly assumed tradeoff between speed and accuracy can be inverted: error correction can actually speed up replication. The key insight is that errors cause `stalling’, i.e., misincorporated bases slow down subsequent steps by factors up to 100,000x. Correcting errors, though costly per base, avoids these long delays and leads to faster overall replication. We support this prediction with data from a large-scale polymerase mutagenesis screen showing that faster polymerases are more accurate. We further show that analogous error-correcting mechanisms, like the dynamic instability of microtubules, can emerge during self-assembly under selection for speed alone. Our work suggests that complex, dissipative error correction can evolve more easily than assumed, as a byproduct of fast replication, even before that accuracy serves any direct function like preserving genetic information.FOR THE LATEST UPDATES AND CONTENT ON SOFT MATTER AND BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS AT THE WEIZMANN, VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.bio
