Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).

Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

Unfortunately, philosophers of science usually regard scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as monistic doctrines. The assumption is that there is one goal of all scientific inference - finding propositions that are true, or finding propositions that are predictively accurate. In fact, there are multiple goals. Sometimes realism is the right interpretation of a scientific problem, while at other times instrumentalism is.

Some philosophical arguments (e.g., in connection with the mind/body problem) look pretty good, while others (e.g., those that criticize moral realism) do not.

Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.