Editing Openai/686aedb2-60b0-8003-98a8-e1766cf496a6 (section)

==== Your worry that “complex molecules cannot create themselves” is, in part, semantic. In prebiotic chemistry selection pressures come from differential stability, solubility, photolysis, etc., not foresight. Powner and colleagues use teleological verbs (“orchestrate”, “choreograph”) as shorthand for these blind filters. When stripped of rhetoric, the claim is: under certain plausible early-Earth conditions, small-molecule reaction networks can spontaneously enrich the same building-blocks biology later used. That is a weaker, but still scientifically meaningful, statement. ====

===== Islam & Powner marshal impressive empirical progress toward cleaning up “prebiotic clutter,” but their headline language runs ahead of what has actually been shown. Self-assembly is demonstrated for intermediates, orchestration for limited networks; information processing remains an unfulfilled ambition. =====

If you want the field to move from metaphor to mechanics, the next milestones would be:
# Continuous, geologically credible settings that yield the same products without human scheduling.
# Autocatalytic or templated reactions that copy sequence information with measurable fidelity.
# Feedback coupling where one reaction branch actively modulates another (true “orchestration”).

Until then, treat the grander phrases as motivational banners, not settled fact.