Environments that structure the chemistry in such a way as to provide a measure of kinetic stability or redundancy for that system-by providing stable fluxes of feedstock molecules, naturally regulating rates so that the desired subset of reactions dominates, and storing and then releasing key chemical intermediates-are the environments that seem most apt to enable collections of molecules within them to self-organize. This serendipitous chemi-cal ordering provided by the environment to the chemical system would only be coincidentally aimed toward the preservation and propagation of that collection of molecules. However, chemical systems directed toward survival and self-propagation will turn out to be the systems that have the greater chance of persisting.