Originally Posted by
Applejack
I will have to pick up this book, but from SU's review and the linked NYRoB review, this seems like a half-baked argument. It seems that Nagel is resting much of his argument on the fact that there are infinitesimal odds of a world with no life naturally progressing into the world in which we live. While it is true that the odds of creating the current set of lifeforms is virtually zero, that doesn't undermine evolution's explanatory power. The ex ante odds of any set of lifeforms being around after hundreds of millions of years of evolution is infinitesimal--evolution does not claim that our set of organisms is the best set.
Nagel is making a quasi-creationist move in claiming that if you created an organism out of whole cloth (as God or Darwin), you would be highly unlikely to have the modern world after setting evolution in motion. But as the NYRoBs points out (paraphrasing Dawkins) this is an argument based on personal incredulity. I have often wondered how life came from nothing, and science certainly has no authoritative narrative about how this occurred. But science is moving closer to answering this question. I find his argument with regards to science's ultimate biological explanatory power to be rather weak.
I won't comment on his cognition arguments as I am under-studied in that area.