What makes a living thing freer than an atom?

History does. Freedom, if the word is to mean anything measurable, is room to be otherwise, and that room accumulates with every record a thing's past has written. A hydrogen atom has one ground state and no strategy available to it. A bacterium carries a heritable record and spends a policy every cycle, divide or repair, swim or sit. In Richard Lenski's experiment one population of E. coli evolved the ability to eat citrate after more than thirty thousand generations, and frozen samples showed the step became reachable only after an earlier change near generation twenty thousand. What a lineage can become is set by what it has done. The early universe, with nothing written down, was the most constrained thing there has ever been.