I disagree with the scale of "billions" of steps. Indeed most of the chemistry that makes up life is pretty straightforward at its core. In fact a lot of these chemicals can do little BUT react and combine in the ways they combine. There's a reason DNA has base "pairs".
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying life isn't complex or the overall chemistry isn't complex, but again, that isn't an indicator of some deeper mystery. There is literally nothing "mysterious" about the chemistry of life.
RNA isn't really that complex, though, is it? It's just 4 bases and a phosphate sugar backbone. As for "complexity" I'd go with proteins which can be EXCEEDINGLY complex but
pretty much only because of the secondary structures. And even those are easily explained by hydrogen bonding and other bond angles.
Unfortunately it appears to be a pretty standard concept, certainly in biology but also in many other systems. It isn't a mystery, it is what happens when a thing with lots of moving interacting parts combine.
I run statistical models on my data and there are "second order effects" which are interactions between the factors I set for the experiment. I have 4 chemicals but I can wind up with up to 8 or so possible interactions which can end up being rather complex to explain. The interactions have created an "emergent property" of the system by their interaction. The system overall is more complex than simply understanding the level of any individual component. For instance if I increase one component it may cause the effect from A DIFFERENT COMPONENT to suddenly flip directions.
Granted this is probably a gross oversimplification of the concept but it is a simple example of how a chemical system can become more complex despite just 4 knobs.
Imagine if you have a knob on your TV with volume and a knob with channel. Now imagine that there's an interaction between the two knobs such that when you increase the volume knob the volume goes up. And when you then turn the channel knob to the right it increases the channel number. But when you turn the volume down the channel knob now
decreases the channel number when you turn it to the right. That's an example of an interaction term. A complexity that is not accounted for by the channel knob alone.
I hope I have explained how that is most assuredly not the case.
Wait, did you just use the word "emerge"?
We are not too far apart in our philosophy here, but I am saying that that "inevitability" is nothing more mysterious than just plain ol' chemistry. Literally nothing more. How else could it be "inevitable" unless it were a function of set physical rules? That's chemistry.
Just like really beautiful complex crystals can form following only a small set of chemical rules (Pauling's Rules).
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