In his book “Mind and Cosmos,” Nagel argues that humans should resist assuming that the tools at their disposal are sufficient to understand the universe as a whole. The limits of science should be identified through philosophical inquiry, and this may eventually lead to the discovery of new forms of scientific understanding. Nagel believes there are empirical reasons to be skeptical of reductionism in biology, which is the orthodox view of physico-chemical reductionism. Doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus. Nagel argues that if contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life, then principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, which are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
Nagel is stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from the religious perspective of intelligent design. Nagel argues that the empirical arguments offered by defenders of intelligent design against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Nagel believes that the prevailing doctrine that life’s appearance from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection involved nothing but the operation of physical law cannot be regarded as unassailable. While Nagel does not regard the design alternative as a real option, he argues that it is a real question whether the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution to its present forms is a result of physical laws alone.
