Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Critique, on London Theatrical Stage?
It seems so from what I read about the new Tom Stoppard play The Hard Problem, now at London's National Theatre, which dramatizes a familiar clash of ideas in the person of a God-believing psychology undergrad student, Hilary, and her Dawkins-like academic supervisor, Spike, who's also her lover. Thomas Nagel was evidently an influence on Stoppard, particular Nagel's presentation of the challenge posed by consciousness to evolutionary materialism.
Listen to evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi, a friend of Stoppard, discussing the play in a public lecture -- just a half hour and very entertaining, especially the part with the audience experiment drawing on game theory and the fate of the male passengers on the Titanic.
The "hard problem" refers to the difficulty, given materialist premises, of accounting for how meat in the form of the brain can give rise to mind. For Hilary, consciousness is the dilemma on which purely materialist science unravels. Leroi professes not to know on which side of the debate Stoppard comes down, whether in denying the Darwinian model (as Nagel does), or with Dawkins in affirming it.
The hostility of some of the reviews Stoppard has received would suggest that the reviewers sense Stoppard is more sympathetic to Nagel, and that such sympathy is not allowed. The Guardian gnashes its teeth: "Often taxed with being too intellectual as a playwright, he is here not intellectually stringent enough."
New Scientist similarly laments: "What was irritating about The Hard Problem was the weight it gave to the hard problem" and "there is more than a whiff of anti-science here, since it argues that we will never be able to explain the conscious experience."
The play doesn't directly mention intelligent design -- for whose theorists the atheist philosopher Nagel has expressed admiration, earning him denunciations across academia. But Stoppard's protagonist Hilary says at one point that she's working on a paper whose equations cast doubt on aspects of human evolution and specifically whether the conventional account allows sufficient time for it. By the end, she has announced that she is making plans to continue her research and studies at New York University -- where, the audience may or may not realize, Nagel himself teaches. That is sly on Stoppard's part. Nagel is not cited by name, but he is in the program notes.
I'm unaware of plans to mount the play in Seattle, so I don't anticipate getting to see it anytime soon. However it sounds like a thoughtful and critical consideration of evolutionary themes.
Well, it's easier for a famous playwright like Stoppard to go off the reservation on these issues, for the same reason it's easier for a distinguished philosopher like Nagel. You reach a certain pinnacle of achievement in your field, and you no longer have to worry about sniping colleagues or tottering status.
It's a nice thing about being venerable. You can say what you want.
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