The genome is the body’s internal instruction manual for becoming what it needs to be in order to pass on the instructions. The subject of this instructional text has been ‘designed’ by the billion-year dialogue between the organism’s ancestors and their changing circumstances. But developmental and evolutionary processes are unlike expert human designers in one crucial respect: they do not look for short cuts that would reach the intended product without going through the infinitely patient dialogue process. Rather than specifying the structure of their devices to suit their intended function, they incorporate a measure of vagueness and indeterminacy, so that the intentions develop along with the organism, the ends along with the means. If the purpose (or ‘meaning’) of a life were already fully determined before it begins, nothing new could happen among the living, except maybe novel styles of failure.