If we are animals, then we need to know this. If I accept–as indeed I must–all the breakthroughs in neuroscience, and all the odd behavioral and cognitive defects that invariably or nearly invariably attend certain brain lesions, this does not also compel me to assume that is the WHOLE story.
Self evidently, the fossil record is one of steadily increasing complexity. Self evidently change happens over time. What is at issue is what the WHOLE story is. I do not think Darwinian accounts have everything they need. I think that natural selection plainly happens, but that systemic adaptation does as well, and there is no room in materialistic accounts for intelligence of any sort. Self organizing systems do not spontaneously organize in PRECISELY the way needed, repeatedly, over millions of years. No, there is something spooky, something immanent, something whose effects I think we can measure, but which we cannot see.
So I take on the one side clearly “true” findings, and simply confine them to their domain. Then I look at the SCIENTIFIC evidence that we are spirits occupying what in some respects ARE machines. But we are not the machines. We operate them, sometimes skillfully, sometimes not. And sometimes they malfunction. This, too, is scientific.
Our task in bridging the two domains is to enter into, understand, and accept fully both.