The Citric Acid people are a tribe of complexity theorists that believe that the citric acid cycle is a living god; the potential of its existence creates an attractor that exerts a pull that is strong enough to drag not just ecosystems but the first cell itself into existence.
Something can only be an attractor if it is already manifest. But things can cross into the attractor via random fluctuations. Are there random fluctuations large enough to not just produce a cell but multiple cells before you get the first viable config? (I don’t think so.)