In the wake of the item about Thomas Nagel's high-profile endorsement of an incompetent book on "Intelligent Design" by Stephen Meyer, a leading shill for the Discovery [sic] Institute, I've heard from many philosopers, especially philosophers of science, who are livid about this. A leading philosopher of biology, for example, gives expression to sentiments I have heard from several correpondents:

Thank you very much for your vigorous examination of Tom Nagel's shameful stunt involving evolutionary biology. The fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about regarding science has been apparent ever since The View from Nowhere, and here it shows again. It reflects on all of us working in philosophy of science, though, when a "famous" philosopher acts so stupidly. Arrogance is the keyword here, I'm sure. Nagel has done irreparable harm, which we'll be paying and paying for, for years to come, insofar as this endorsement will be used in school board battles across the nation. Thanks very much for your coverage of this farce.

Meanwhile, Branden Fitelson (Berkeley, moving to Rutgers), a leading expert on probability and decision theory who has done well-known critical analysis of the work of ID apologist William Dembski, writes:

Thanks for your recent posts on the Nagel/Meyer fiasco. I've been looking at Meyer's book, and one thing (among many) that really bothers me is that Meyer spends a lot of time engaging in "Dembski worship", but he doesn't even cite (much less discuss) the only comprehensive and serious review of Dembski's first book (which forms much of Meyer's "basis" for his "Dembski worship"), which was written by Elliott Sober, Chris Stephens, and myself (and published in Philosophy of Science in 1999). This strikes me as rather irresponsible of Meyer (and, indirectly, of course, of Nagel too).

Since Meyer's book obviously is not a scholarly investigation of its subject, but a partisan tract whose technical pretensions are meant to dazzle and confuse the ignorant, it is hardly surprising that it lets pass in silence any critical scholarship that might interfere with the con job. But one would hope that Thomas Nagel has heard of the journal Philosophy of Science, and perhaps even of Elliott Sober. One might even have thought that, being well aware what all philosophers of biology think about this issue, he might have spent some time studying the scholarly literature before going out on a limb. But perhaps, as the other correspondent noted, "arrogance is the keyword here."

