  We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved
exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other
explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of
polymerization reactions, where the reaction rates can have chiral-selective
values. The reactions are neither autocatalytic nor do they contain explicit
enantiomeric cross-inhibition terms. We are thus investigating how rare a set
of chiral-selective reaction rates needs to be in order to generate a
reasonable amount of chiral bias. We quantify our results adopting a
statistical approach: varying both the mean value and the rms dispersion of the
relevant reaction rates, we show that moderate to high levels of chiral excess
can be achieved with fairly small chiral bias, below 10%. Considering the
various unknowns related to prebiotic chemical networks in early Earth and the
dependence of reaction rates to environmental properties such as temperature
and pressure variations, we argue that homochirality could have been achieved
from moderate amounts of chiral selectivity in the reaction rates.
