Complex and Messy Prebiotic Chemistry: Obstacles and Opportunities for an RNA World

Traditional prebiotic chemistry experiments often isolated single reactions under clean, controlled conditions, yet early Earth was chemically diverse and physically dynamic. Such primordial complexity likely imposed obstacles, including side reactions, low yields, and unstable intermediates, but it also generated opportunities, including redundant routes, parallel pathways, and environmental filters that could bias mixtures toward subsets of persistent and chemically productive compounds. This review examines how heterogeneous prebiotic settings could generate RNA precursors, including nucleobases, ribose, and phosphate-containing species, through multiple concurrent pathways. Although side reactions can sequester carbon in inert tars and reduce yields of specific targets, networked chemistry can also enhance robustness when different routes converge on shared intermediates, or when apparent byproducts reenter productive cycles. Environmental factors such as ultraviolet irradiation, mineral surfaces, wet-dry cycling, and thermal gradients can act as constraints that enrich certain products by differential stability, reactivity, and compartmentalization. In this context, the RNA world hypothesis remains compelling, as RNA can store heritable sequence information and catalyze reactions through sequence dependent folding, thereby linking heredity and chemistry within a single polymer. At the same time, the emergence of functional sequence information and of control architectures that couple sequence to reproducible function remains a central open problem, and it sets clear limits on what chemistry alone can explain. Rather than dismissing messy mixtures as irrelevant noise, it is more accurate to treat them as the native context in which concentration mechanisms, environmental cycling, and selective persistence could enable the accumulation and survival of RNA related molecules.