How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one: We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. But how does evolution actually work? In these essays, writers from throughout the field of biology explore the question of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke, how it got kick-started, and where evolution may take us.