If the will is guided by elements outside the set of the individual, then that will is not free.
Informed decisions made according to perceived criteria are not free
by assumption?
The supernatural assumption is confusing you. Badly.
People making decisions based on their ideas and information they acquire exhibit a great deal of freedom. Watch a basketball game.
Each must behave at the traffic light according to the dictates of their evolutionary history.
What their evolutionary history has "dictated" is that they have the capability of making decisions, choosing among alternatives according to incoming information.
And when I say each, I mean the material behavior at every level of constituency.
Including the level we call the "human mind". That's the "level of constituency" making the decision at hand (traffic light). You have to stretch your definition of "material" quite a bit past the usual, to encompass it, but if you want to - - - .
After all each defined entity is just a collection of material stuff that is at the mercy of a bigger collection of material stuff.
If you are going to expand the category "material" to include patterns of action at the level of the conscious human mind, you would be better off junking words like "just".
Only in the sense that it wasn’t the human doing the choosing. The human was essentially a tool of the universe in manifesting a given outcome.
You contradict yourself. The human did the choosing - whether as a "tool of the universe" or not, "essentially" or any other way.
How is an accounting of all the elemental factors that determine human action in conflict with observed human behavior?
It isn't. You had overlooked some major factors, is all.
How does a brain scan demonstrate free will?
It records the substrate manifestations of the behavior of the mind when making a decision and generating an act of will. The matter of freedom remains a matter of discussion - still open, btw, if we can ever get past the supernatural assumption.
