A key to expanding the search for a prebiotically relevant self-replicating system that amplifies enantiomeric excess may lie in the concept of reaction networks rather than in a single, simple autocatalytic reaction. The concept of chemical cycles and their potential role in prebiotic chemistry may be considered as efficient means of producing reservoirs of the organic building blocks required for the increasingly complex chemical transformations that ultimately produced life. Autocatalysis is key to enzymatic chemical cycles with the capacity for informational self-replication. Between these two extreme roles -on one hand the simple mass production and stocking of nutrients, and on the other the complex dynamic process of passing on genetic information -chemical cycles have been bequeathed another role by a group of scientists known as "metabolists," who suggest that self-organizing, interconnected cycles might have developed without the aid, and prior to the evolution, of enzymes. However, equally compelling arguments are made by the opposing camp of "geneticists" that the level of efficiency and specificity demanded for evolutionary success of a small-molecule metabolic cycle has not been demonstrated to date. Indeed, this counterpoint has been seen as another "call to arms" to synthetic organic chemists to participate more directly in the experimentally driven search for chemical reactions and networks that may give rise to the emergence of life. It is upon this backdrop, focusing on ancient chemistry, that the subject of modern amino acid catalysis introduces the question of how complexity in organic reaction cycles may evolve.