I know I'm resurrecting an old thread, but here's some chum for the waters. To understand free will is to understand informed, choice, and informed choice can be understood via "dual rationality":

    Finally, consider the libertarian notion of dual rationality, a requirement whose importance to the libertarian I did not appreciate until I read Robert Kane's Free Will and Values. As with dual control, the libertarian needs to claim that when agents make free choices, it would have been rational (reasonable, sensible) for them to have made a contradictory choice (e.g. chosen not A rather than A) under precisely the conditions that actually obtain. Otherwise, categorical freedom simply gives us the freedom to choose irrationally had we chosen otherwise, a less-than-entirely desirable state. Kane (1985) spends a great deal of effort in trying to show how libertarian choices can be dually rational, and I examine his efforts in Chapter 8. (The Non-Reality of Free Will, 16)

I might throw in theoretical biologist Robert Rosen's Anticipatory Systems; Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations. To anticipate is to have a model of the future. Well, if there are 2+ models of the future from which to choose, then under certain circumstances there might be a choice between them.

Now, what makes the choice non-random? Well, if many such choices can be clustered in a non-random way. This is a non-atomistic, non-reductionist way of thinking; to see an example of it in physics, see a bit from Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine:

    Is this difficulty merely a practical one? Yes, if we consider that trajectories have now become uncomputable. But there is more: Probability distribution permits us to incorporate within the framework of the dynamical description the complex microstructure of the phase space. It therefore contains additional information that is lacking at the level of individual trajectories. As we shall see in Chapter 4, this has fundamental consequences. At the level of distribution functions ρ, we obtain a new dynamical description that permits us to predict the future evolution of the ensemble, including characteristic time scales. (The End of Certainty, 37)

"Presented with the fact that he acts strikingly unlike other animals"

He acts like a human being. This in many ways is the same of similar to other animals, and in other ways quite characteristic of his species.

(You have made your mind up before you start.)

Speak for yourself. Additionally there ARE naturalists.
You may feel ashamed but clothes also do protect, from armour even of a primitive to simple protection from insect bites.

In most parts of the world it gets cold, at least at times.
It's also a way of decorating yourself.
And we all know it is part of the human game of one-upmanship (clothes and fashion).
And fashion has been an industry for some time.
And it can be fun.
And no end of other reasons.

Oh, I agree with that point - I vaguely remember Marc had a post about how the Virgin Mary was comfortably portrayed as breastfeeding, even breastfeeding a grown man, without it being particularly sexual.
My point was more about the "should we feel ashamed" question being answered, at least in part, by reference to what could be anomalies.

I guess I would propose that we just use "desire" to refer to a complex kind of "tendency". You might have to be "willing" to use words like "will" and "desire" in reference to your own complex needs, otherwise it is a bit difficult to communicate.

I do appreciate (and maybe this is what you were getting at?) that the relatively simple "desires" of amino acids are different than the desires that we feel (I would say that our desires are simply more evolved and complex). Nonetheless, I don't know if there is really a better word for what amino acids "feel" (again, I put "feel" in quotes, because it is less complex / less evolved than the feelings that we feel).

Here is a clip of a pretty smart guy who is also struggling with the same language difficulties that you and I are. Like you, he doesn't want to use the words "God" and "will" and "sentience" when talking about cosmology and quantum physics. I understand this hesitancy, but on the other hand he is unable to propose any other existing words in our language for what he is referring to. http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=swimme&topic=whatsgod

True, cminca! There are many reasons people wear clothes. Also for art & beauty, for seduction, for transporting stuff (pockets!), for fitting in or status, as you said --- for lots of reasons.

With regard to clothing and status, you might be interested in sumptuary laws.

Geena--
Great answer, but I feel like you left one thing out.
Status.
People use clothing as a means of displaying both membership of a group or to indicate elevated position within the group.
Which was one of the points of the fairy tale.