SO ENDS this first of two weekends looking at biology as a set of processes rather than a set of things. There is a sea change going on in the bigger context, from quantum physics all the way through biology to geology, namely, that things, and events or processes, are deeply entwined and interconnected; the idea of doing a chemical reaction in a test tube to replicate the origin of life in the early Earth is now seen as ridiculous, because it ignores geochemical and geophysical influences, which are messy and complicated. Take anything out of its embedded context and it is an artifice.