You will hear a lecture. After listening to the lecture, in 10 seconds, please speak into the microphone and retell what you have just heard from the lecture in your own words. You will have 40 seconds to give your response.

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 I started being interested yonks back, when I was about eight, when I got a chemistry set and a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as birthday presents. Because they seemed to be ways not merely of trying to understand the world, and explaining how humans had emerged, but also to control the world. You could do experiments. You could control things. You could work out what might happen. You could test it. Knowledge and power, understanding the world and controlling, predicting bits of the world are really what being a scientist is about. I think one of the problems often that natural scientists have, social scientists have, and a lot of the philosophers of science have, is that there’s one thing called science. And the physical sciences and the biological sciences, the chemical sciences are all doing the same sorts of things. We’re not. Physics and chemistry deal with really rather simple matters, with a high degree of precision. The essence of biological living systems is complexity, and non-reproducibility. The arrow of time works only in one direction for biology. And processes are always irreversible. That makes life very very difficult indeed.