“Mind and Cosmos,” weighing in at 128 closely argued pages, is hardly a barn-burning polemic. But in his cool style Mr. Nagel extends his ideas about consciousness into a sweeping critique of the modern scientific worldview, which he calls a “heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense.” Consciousness, meaning and moral value, he argues, aren’t just incidental features of life on earth, but fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead of random evolution Mr. Nagel sees the unfolding of a “cosmic predisposition.”

Such ideas are anathema to modern evolutionary theorists. Mr. Nagel calls for an entirely new kind of science, one based on what he calls “natural teleology” — a tendency for the universe to produce certain outcomes, like consciousness, but without any help from a Godlike agent.

To many reviewers, however, including some who have themselves been critical of efforts to find Darwinian explanations for all aspects of human behavior, Mr. Nagel’s own arguments fail to grapple with some well-established scientific facts.

After all, they argue, the evolutionary record shows plenty of lineages moving from complex structures to simpler ones, to say nothing of extinction — both of which throw cold water on the notion of teleology. As for Mr. Nagel’s “untutored reaction of incredulity” (as he himself puts it in the book) that random evolution could have produced conscious beings capable, say, of doing science and philosophy in the 3.8 billion years since life on earth began, some point out that he fails to consider the vast size and age of the universe and the likelihood that consciousness might have emerged somewhere, at some time.

“I wouldn’t criticize him for not knowing a lot of details about evolutionary biology,” said Elliott Sober, a philosopher of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was highly critical of “Mind and Cosmos” in Boston Review. But Mr. Nagel’s arguments, he continued, are marred by flawed reasoning about probability: “He sees the origins of life and consciousness as remarkable facts which had to have had a high probability of happening. I don’t buy that.”