The point of discussing evolution and the concept of scientific determinism is not, in this case, to provide a critiques of science itself, nor of evolution, nor to suggest some kind of alternative theory for the origins of life or the mind or the life of the mind, for that matter. It is merely an analogy by way of contrasting some fundamental worldviews. The tendency of science and its subsets is unquestionably towards reduction. Things (like the mind) are reduced to their components (brain structures, brain cells, and finally the chemical events that make up brain cells and everything that happens in them). The problem with this, at least in terms of life and the mind, is that it so far leaves some very big questions. For example, attempts to anatomically explain the mind - that is, to correlate the qualities of mind to particular structures and functions in the brain - have met with patchy results at best. Memory, for example, cannot be located in a particular area of the brain. Some patients may suffer a major physical brain trauma and experience little loss of memory, while other have what seems a relatively minor injury that nonetheless seriously impairs their recall. There are similar difficulties in understanding how a zygote, a simple undifferentiated cell, begins to specialize, to take on the qualities of an organism. Of course, the defense of science is always to insist that these things have simply not been discovered yet. And no doubt that's true, to an extent... But there is a level on which the process of reduction simply fails to explain what's really going on.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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