I don’t think Nagel will cause any dogmatic Darwinists to change their spots, but they’ll never change. The people he potentially attracts are the many silent fence-sitters. By focusing on a specific book (not simply a general idea), and one that is by someone who is undeniably pro-ID, and without criticism — those are all important rhetorical moves. And given that Nagel writes for a broad range of venues, I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing.

IIRC, Nagel’s skepticism vis the explanatory powers of orthodox evolutionary theory was plainly evident as far back as “The View From Nowhere” (1986). And, as he explicitly indicates in the above cited essay, he is a layman so far as these questions are concerned. So I don’t see the above as anything new, or particularly game changing.

My guess is that Nagel will take a lot of flak for this (check out the letters to the TLS over the next few weeks — they’re available on-line).

As it stands, I see nothing in the above that does any more than note that Meyer has skillfully drawn attention to the severe challenges entailed in attaining a natural explanation of the OOL. While Meyer has also pointed to the ID as an alternative, Nagel does not, at least not in this passage. So I don’t see crossings of lines.

But perhaps he has done so elsewhere.

So far major anti-naturalistic, non-theistic philosophers like Nagel and Fodor have drawn attention to Darwinism’s shortcomings but have stopped short of pointing to ID as a viable alternative. For this line to have been crossed — and in a high profile, generally pro-evolution venue like the TLS — may turn out to be a major turning point in the argument.

Fiendishly difficult? I thought it was as simple as a little mix of chance, with a smidgion of necessity, saute’d in a buttery sauce of selection for a few billion years, and voila! Suddenly it all seems rather hard to swallow.