The transition of chemistry into biology is poorly understood. Key questions include how the inherently divergent nature of chemical reactions can be curtailed, and whether Darwinian principles from biology extend to chemistry. Addressing both questions simultaneously, we now show that the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion, which states that a single niche can be stably occupied by only one species, also applies to self-replicating chemical systems, and that this principle diminishes the tendency of chemistry to diversify. Specifically, we report two systems in which three different self-replicator quasi-species emerge in a largely stochastic fashion from a mixture of two building blocks (resources). Competitive exclusion leads to the selection of only a single quasi-species when all replicators rely to the same extent on both resources. When one of the quasi-species preferentially uses one resource and another quasi-species specializes in the other (resource partitioning), these replicator quasi-species effectively occupy different niches and were found to coexist in an evolutionary stable steady state.

人们对化学向生物学的转变知之甚少。关键问题包括如何减少化学反应固有的分歧性质，以及生物学中的达尔文原理是否延伸到化学。同时回答这两个问题，我们现在表明竞争排斥的进化原则，即单个生态位只能被一个物种稳定占据，也适用于自我复制的化学系统，并且该原则减少了化学多样化的趋势。具体来说，我们报告了两个系统，其中三个不同的自我复制器准物种在很大程度上以随机方式从两个构建块（资源）的混合物中出现。竞争排斥导致当所有复制器在相同程度上依赖两种资源时，只选择单一的准物种。当一个准物种优先使用一种资源而另一个准物种专门使用另一种资源（资源分配）时，这些复制器准物种有效地占据了不同的生态位，并被发现以进化稳定的稳定状态共存。