This informative and enjoyable book tells about the Piltdown hoax and the fake drawings of Ernst Haeckel, the famous advocate of Darwinism in Germany. There is another hoax about evolution that has not yet been exposed. It is widely believed by physicists that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, according to which nature tends to go from order to disorder. In fact, the American Journal of Physics published an article ("Entropy and evolution," Am. J. Phys., Vol. 76, No. 11, November 2008) and a note ("Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics," Am. J. Phys., Vol. 77, No. 10, October 2009) with fake calculations proving that the second law is not violated. The truth is that the second law does not apply to biological evolution or the evolution of stars.

The idea that a living organism is a thermodynamic system is similar to the absurd idea that natural selection acting upon innovations explains how mammals evolved from bacteria in only 3.5 billion years. It takes a fertilized egg 18 years to produce all of the cells in a human. (I know because my urologist told me the prostate gland stops growing at this age and starts growing again at the age of 30, so much for intelligent design.) Not enough is known about the innovations natural selection acts upon to understand how the same thing happened with a bacterium as the starting point. Evolutionary biologists always speak of "adaptive evolution." Darwin expressed this by saying it was "absurd in the highest degree" to think natural selection gave us the human eye.

Windchy sees in this quote from Charles Darwin some kind of self-delusion. He also misrepresents the way mainstream biologists rebut the idea of "irreducible complexity" put forth by advocates of intelligent design. It is not rebutted it in peer-reviewed journals and biology textbooks, but it is ridiculed only in popular books, magazines, and lectures.

Windchy thinks the theory of intelligent design is reasonable. I think it is irrational because there is no evidence for it. But it is also dishonest not to admit that intelligent design is a better theory than natural selection, in some sense. This raises the question of why one side in this conflict about evolutionary biology is irrational and the other side is dishonest. The general answer is that evolution is related to religion, and religion causes conflict between people. Conflict causes anxiety, and inhibition is a defense mechanism for anxiety. Advocates of intelligent design and their opponents are inhibited from thinking rationally and behaving honestly.

My theory is that both sides don't understand the cosmological argument for God's existence. See: The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. They both think the argument has to do with the Big Bang and a "first cause." The cosmological argument is based on the observation that human beings have free will. This means humans are finite beings, as well as embodied spirits. Since a finite being needs a cause, an infinite being exists if the universe is intelligible. Hindus and Buddhists have a different terminology, but in the West we call the infinite being God.

God was motivated to create finite beings because He loved Himself as giving. But He just as well could love Himself without giving. We don't explain our existence by thinking God created us and keeps us in existence, and we can't use God's existence to answer scientific questions. The evidence that the universe is intelligible is the success of the scientific method and the fact that things don't pop into or out of existence. Windchy thinks the Big Bang, the origin of life, evolution, and the fine-tuning of the coupling constants in physics is evidence that God exists. In my opinion, these phenomena are evidence God does not exist.