Do neurons control your behaviour. They do and they don't. Certainly they carry the information but the body doesn't conform to their individual wishes. Yet doesn't society select certain types of people as leaders. It's not that simple, of course.
Human ideas do have an effect.
Yet the way that ideas are selected or ignored seems to be dictated by the needs of the society in which they occur. New ideas are like the random mutation of genes. Murder is reckoned the ultimate crime. Animal lives, on the other hand, are protected only as property. Ask yourself, though, what the production cost of an educated westerner would be.