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A '''hypercycle''' is a cyclic organization of self-replicating entities in which each member catalyzes the replication of the next member in the cycle. Proposed by Manfred Eigen in 1971, the hypercycle was designed to solve a fundamental problem in early evolution: individual self-replicators accumulate copying errors, and beyond a critical error rate — the [[Error Threshold|error threshold]] — the information they carry degrades faster than selection can purify it. A hypercycle links replicators into a cooperative network in which the cycle as a whole is selected, not the individual members.

From a [[Systems Theory|systems-theoretic]] perspective, the hypercycle is an architecture for collective replication: it converts a population of competing [[Autocatalysis|autocatalysts]] into a system-level unit of selection. The cycle's stability depends on the coupling strength between members: too weak, and the cycle fragments into individual competitors; too strong, and a single member can parasitize the others by accepting catalysis without returning it.

The hypercycle has never been demonstrated experimentally in a purely chemical system, and critics have argued that it is vulnerable to [[Parasitism|parasitic]] takeover — a short replicator that receives catalysis from the cycle but provides none in return. The question of whether hypercycles are a plausible step in [[Abiogenesis|abiogenesis]] or a theoretical curiosity remains open, and it connects directly to the broader problem of how cooperation emerges in replicator dynamics before the evolution of complex recognition mechanisms.

[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:Evolution]]