Abstract: How and if information is maintained through polymer replication is among the most fundamental issues in studies of the origins of life, as first noted by Manfred Eigen. The "error catastrophe" problem in replication asserts that maintenance of information is more difficult for longer polymers due to thermodynamically inevitable errors. In this study, we analyzed the population dynamics of replicating templates explicitly incorporated with the kinetics of the fundamental polymerization process. Numerical and theoretical analyses suggest that the template-directed polymerization process entails an inherent error-correction mechanism akin to the kinetic proofreading proposed by J. J. Hopfield. Interestingly, because of such effects, the tolerance to errors increases with the length of the replicating template polymer, which solves the error-catastrophe problem. Therefore, the findings provide novel principles for error correction without sophisticated and specific mechanisms that are potentially applicable to replication under origins of life scenarios. Y. J. Matsubara, N. Takeuchi, & K. Kaneko arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09961 (2021)