Right-thinking people often assume that, though they must act as if they have free will, science requires them to deny it. As reflected in their titles, both Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: Life Without Free Will (2023) and Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (2023) make lucid and engaging arguments, based on the latest scientific evidence, which come to starkly opposite conclusions. ‘And yet’, Sapolsky continues, ‘I think that is irrelevant.’ It might be true that no particular scientific finding disproves free will, but ‘put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will’, ‘not a single crack of daylight’ left to ‘shoehorn’ it in. As Mitchell points out, ‘to be free of such constraints would be to act randomly, pointlessly, on a whim, for no reason. As Sapolsky admits, ‘in everyday life, in jury boxes, schoolrooms, award ceremonies, eulogies, and the work of experimental philosophers, people hold on to the notion of free will with ferocious tenacity.’ This holds across cultures and even species: ‘Heck, even chimps believe in free will’.