For a long time, the only kinds of processes whose workings could be understood were those that either quickly damped out to a uniform state (Wolfram type 1), such as a stone falling to the ground or a coal burning; repeated themselves cyclically (Wolfram type 2), such as the tide or a steam engine or walking; or produced chaotic or unpredictably "random" changes (Wolfram type 3), such as ocean waves or the weather. None of those processes seemed able to create any complex thing, types 1 and 2 because they do not generate novel complex patterns and type 3 because they cannot preserve the novel complex patterns they generate.
So, everything that was observed to create complex persistent things, like biological growth and development and human thought, was believed to be the result of some sort of magic rather than any possible physical process. That's why one of the greatest philosophical mysteries for millennia was how human thought, considered not a physical process, could cause our limbs to move, which clearly was a physical process...
Those who still hold to that belief today still cannot answer the question of how the nonphysical affects the physical, except by vague analogy to things like antennas (the brain) picking up signals (the will to move ones arm). These signals are otherwise undetectable and their nature and makeup is not only completely unknown, it cannot ever be known. It cannot ever be known because even if such a signal were somehow discovered, it would either be a physical process itself (like, say, nerve conduction or radio waves) or it would not be (like, say, the will of a soul), leaving the question of how the physical and the nonphysical could possibly interact still unanswered and unanswerable.
Fortunately, we have a better answer, which is that all those phenomena that were far too amazing to possibly be the results of physical process, and thus had to be attributed to mysterious creative forces of the universe, are actually the results of physical processes. That eliminates the need for an impossible interface between the physical and the nonphysical.
Specifically, they are all Wolfram type 4 processes, which can both generate and preserve persistent complex patterns, a previously unrecognized type of behavior. These processes include biological evolution, certain iterative processes arising in pure mathematics, and the behavior of computing machines when programmed in certain ways.
The creative power of such processes was not recognized at first. For instance, well after the process of evolution was understood, some philosophers were claiming that there must be some mystical force ("élan vital") separate from evolution itself driving evolution toward more complex forms. (Kind of like the idea that there must be some mystical force separate from the brain that makes the brain conscious, come to think of it.) The idea that even very simple processes starting with very simple initial configurations could generate complex forms via type 4 behavior was not recognized until the current millennium...
Self-preservation is not we-preservation and breeding is between a male and female, not between all of the species.
