Evo, you are talking about higher-order consciousness while Canute is talking about the more general phenomenal consciousness.
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcintosh/consc.htm that goes into a bit of deeper detail. I imagine I'll check out that biology thread and address this issue in more detail over there, however.
As for the issue of evolution and consciousness. I find it unfortunate that some firmly on the materialist side continue to badly misrepresent the philosophical problems of consciousness, although on the whole it has been a pretty fair discussion.
For my part, I don't think evolutionary theory as it stands is much the worse for its exclusion of consciousness. Here we should be specific: by consciousness we really mean phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience, as the other aspects of consciousness (including at least higher-order consciousness, discriminatory consciousness, responsive consciousness-- see link) are not in themselves problematic in principle for a purely physicalist theory.
The reason the ommission of P-consciousness is not terribly problematic for a theory of evolution is that it is still an open issue whether or not P-consciousness is causally efficacious in any way; that is, whether or not it is epiphenomenal. If it is shown one day to be causally efficacious, then certainly it must be taken into account by an evolutionary theory, but it would seem premature to say that a theory is incomplete for ommitting a phenomenon whose causal relevance is yet to be determined.
In particular, the purported causal role of P-consciousness would seem to be readily filled by causal mechanisms that are already part of the physicalist model of reality. This is precisely why the philosophical notion of the 'zombie' is a useful one-- because it would seem that we can describe the behavior of an organism (in particular, a human) in purely physical terms without needing to invoke P-consciousness at all. Canute has said:
Zombies are hypothetical entities that cannot exist for logical reasons. Therefore human being cannot be zombies as biologist usually assume.
But the logical plausibility of zombies is precisely what makes them a compelling tool in the philosophy of mind. No one supposes that zombies actually exist in the real world, but that is besides the point. We might say that zombies are
logically possible but cannot exist in our world (or so we presume) as a consequence of the
contingent laws of our world.
So, for instance, the concern Canute raises in the following quote is not particularly troublesome for a physicalist theory of evolution:
One advantage of including consciousness in evolutionary theory is that we would then have a reason for why human beings care whether they live or die and thus evolve.
A physicalist theory can still tell a relatively straightforward causal story as to why e.g. a primitive human might run from a tiger. On this view, sensory inputs from the tiger enter the human's brain and activate a series of neural impulses which ultimately stimulate his muscles to engage in a 'run away' behavior. Importantly, P-consciousness has not been invoked here, nor need it be for a coherent causal picture to be painted. The adequacy of this causal story as a complete depiction of reality ultimately depends on whether or not P-consciousness is epiphenomenal.
Of course, this still leaves us with an impoverished understanding of P-consciousness itself, be it epiphenomenal or not. But evolution is concerned with telling a causal story about the development and propagation of genes. If P-consciousness is not involved in that causal story then evolution is not obligated to talk about it, even if the fact remains that P-consciousness itself is an explanandum in its own right in need of explanation under any circumstance.
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