I wish I had kept count

Another oddity in the ol' textbooks that I noticed this week - the phrases "spontaneously assemble" and "self-assemble" seem to to pop up quite often in discussions regarding the tiniest building blocks of life. There's no explanation of how these little molecules know how to combine in exactly the right way (and yes, there are frequently other possible configurations), or how they know to get together in the first place. Apparently these things just kind of happen. And I wish I had kept count of each time these phrases appeared so I'd know how often.