The formose reaction (FR) has attracted attention since its discovery, especially due to its potential relevance to the origins of life for reasons which reflect changing conceptions of what life fundamentally is and how life may have begun . The FR converts plausibly prebiotic environmentally-supplied reactive zero-valent carbon in the form of HCHO into more complex compounds which are important for biology, for example aldonic acids that can be a storage compound for ribose . The FR may provide a way to encode information in the temporal states of molecules and produce molecules that create new phases . The undirected mechanisms of the FR produce compounds of biological interest and may steer products in terms of abundance and homochirality, but there is a gulf between the stochastic steering so far evident in the FR compared with measurable evolutionary contingency.