[oxymoran]

By that metric, everything just happens though. Humans just happened, we didn’t will ourselves into existence. Human free will cannot be proved and may very well just be an illusion in our perceiving of a cosmic causal chain. Are our “desires” for reproduction any different? Or are they artifacts of our internal calculations of the future? When we are optimistic, we reproduce. When we are pessimistic, we don’t. That seems more like opportunism than free will to me. And that seems very much like what a pathogen would encounter: favorable or unfavorable conditions.

I guess what I am saying is that either you are right and that can be extrapolated all the way up the chain to humanity. Or that you are wrong and you can apply free will all the way down the chain.