Traversing billions of years of evolution, Kevin Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. 

Across a billion years of Earth's history, life evolved the power to choose. Most things in the universe are caught up in the flow of physical causation around them but life doesn’t like to be pushed around. Life holds itself apart. First, living beings maintain a barrier with the outside world – this is what distinguishes them as entities. And second, they do work to keep themselves organised, and in doing so seem to resist the second law of thermodynamics.