Free Will c.450BC-2007AD

As A Dodo has no choice but to report the passing of Free Will, which - after many years of illness - has been ordered into eternity by a team of neuroscientists from Germany, London and Oxford.

Free Will was born in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece in about 450BC when, following Socrates's conclusion that "the good - being identical with the true - imposes itself irresistibly on the will as on the intellect when distinctly apprehended and that every man necessarily wills his greatest good, and his actions are merely means to this end", one of his students punched him in the face for being a dreadful old bore.

Free Will was an unpopular child – frequently getting into fights with philosophers who felt their decision to gang up on Free Will and attempt to beat it to a pulp were all preordained by bearded men on Mount Olympus given to chucking thunderbolts about and changing into swans and bulls to ravish young maidens. Later on it would grow up be an unpopular adult, frequently getting into fights with Logical, Biological and Theological determinists who thought their decision to gang up on Free Will was preordained by past events, the contents of their genes or a bearded man in the sky with a strange resemblance to Dr Rowan Williams.

After two millennia of hard knocks, and a succession of increasingly repressive British Home Secretaries, Free Will first began to complain of feeling unwell when millions of Britons felt compelled to vote New Labour into power in 1997, while in 2000 millions of Americans thought they were voting the Democrats into power but were told otherwise by Jeb Bush and Fox News. Free Will continued about its business but its health was repeatedly called into question after a rapid series of heavy blows including speed cameras, CCTV, biometric passports, DNA testing, ASBOs, 28-day detention without trial and the continuing success of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

The final blow for Free Will came when it was revealed that neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, with colleagues from University College London and Oxford University, had developed a new technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and predict their intentions before they act. On making the discovery they immediately informed Free Will, which promptly did as it was told and died.

Free Will has asked to be cremated in a secular service but will instead be held for 28 days before being buried at St John the Reid’s Church of Thoughtcrime. It is survived by the National Lottery.

Freedom c.100,000BC-2006AD

A fun-loving child of the swinging one-hundred- thousand-BCies, Freedom was always known for her liberating, devil-may-care attitude and easygoing views on everything from drugs to sexual morality. Often caricatured as something of a hippie by her opponents, beneath her happy-go-lucky persona there lay a resolute fighter for liberty and a believer in the inalienable rights of each and every being. From her time hanging around with the notorious hairy hominid group "Homo Sapiens" to today, Freedom always campaigned for the downtrodden, beginning in her youth with such simple campaigns as for the right to pick fleas off one's mate (a right still enjoyed today by many Glastonbury Festival-goers).

Far bigger things were ahead. By the second millennium BC, Freedom was encouraging the Israelites to say goodbye to "the Man" ("the Man" being, in fact, "the Pharaoh") and "find themselves" by going on a walkabout amid the dunes and deserts of the Middle East. Only two millennia later she was staging her next major "happening", persuading young Goths and Vandals from all over Europe to come to Rome to hold a sit-in and "express themselves" ... something that they succeeded in doing with great gusto and pretty much all over the place.

In the centuries that followed, Freedom wandered across the globe, "fighting the power" wherever it could be found. By the latter part of the eighteenth century she was to be found dancing the night away with the likes of Thomas Paine and the heroes of the American War of Independence. During this time she also fell in with a group of French exchange students, going off with them to Paris to hold a mindblowing (or, more precisely, head chopping) Revolution. Not long after she was wigging out with newly-freed slaves before going on to explore her womanhood with the aid of suffragettes (and later Mars bars) before ignoring her advancing years to don a pink cowboy hat and chaps (and very little else) to march for gay rights.

Such a controversial lifestyle could not help but to attract enemies. Over the years Freedom found herself assailed from both left and right and by powers temporal and spiritual ... all of whom wanted to have as much freedom as possible for themselves (often including the freedoms to amass vast luxury for themselves, to oppress anyone they didn't like at all and, strangely enough, to sleep with any member of the animal kingdom they chose) while denying it to everybody else. Despite their attacks, Freedom carried on untroubled.

While Freedom managed to come through her wild life unscathed, not all of her friends were so lucky. Many of her oldest friends began to show increasing signs of paranoia, perhaps due to the bitter experiences of centuries fighting oppression, perhaps due to a massive intake of alcohol and cocaine in their youth. Several developed an obsession with ensuring Freedom's safety. Fearful that she might be attacked by "evildoers", and despite the protests of Freedom herself, they insisted that she leave her home on fewer and fewer occasions and then only with an armed escort. Eventually, those who claimed to be her closest companions confined her to her room, where they kept her under constant surveillance by CCTV. Deprived of the liberty she always craved, Freedom began to drift away.

Freedom will be buried this weekend. She is survived by her complete biometric data, surveillance files and CCTV footage, which will remain on a centralised database for all eternity.