More details of my views on the subject can be found here.
With the rise of “open source biology” in the coming decades, you’ll probably be able to sequence your own non-coding DNA and create a pack of customized cockroaches. Here are your Nietzschean uebermensch: they’ll share approx. 98% of your genome and do a fine job of maximizing your reproductive fitness.
Only in humans does it make predictive sense to talk about intent, capability, and inclination, and the wide gap between these kinds of perceived “properties” of fellow socially interacting humans, and the generally much simpler properties seen in inanimate objects and animals, leads the brain to allocate them to widely separated groups of buckets. It is this perceived separation in mental thing-space that leads to the the a free-will boundary being drawn around the cluster of socially interacting humans.
careful there. animistic beliefs are quite widespread in tribal societies, so the notion that the brain allocates two entirely distinct clusters to humans and animals vs. inanimate objects is quite suspect.