Evolution is a big lie perpetrated, not by autocrats or Big Brother, but by people who fancy themselves intellectual and scientific. Such beliefs prove one thing: intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom.

If the rest of this piece seems just a tad on the facetious, cynical side, it's simply because this writer has a hard time being serious while discussing such silliness as Darwinism. Nevertheless, where the context demands it, we will of course be properly pedantic.

A definition of evolution is in order: it is the theory that all life-forms evolved from lower forms, and in the beginning a single cell, which mysteriously appeared from non-living organic matter, was the great-great-etcetera-grandfather of all life. Everything evolved strictly by accident, random events, uncontrolled changes without logic or reason. There was no intelligence or purposefulness behind the staggering number of transitions that started with Cell One and wound up with ants and elephants and hummingbirds and oak trees and human beings, with frogs and philosophers.

To appreciate the absurdity of it, consider this mathematical trivia: if one of each letter from a Scrabble game is dropped in a pile and chosen at random, the probability of selecting them alphabetically, or in any other specified order, is 26 factorial, meaning 26 x 25 x 24 and so on. That comes out to one chance in a bit over 400 septillion (4 followed by 26 zeroes).

403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000

Now imagine, if you will, that the 3,568,489 letters of the King James Bible are spread out across a parking lot. A chimp is then assigned the job of picking up the letters and laying them in a row. Evolution's principle is that letter by letter the text of the Bible is perfectly reproduced.

Needless to say, the mathematical odds against accidental, uncontrolled evolution beginning with a single cell and ending with the diversity and disparity of life forms now on Earth are too enormous to even calculate. (It was estimated that the chance evolution of a horse involves odds of one in 10e60000, which is the technical way of saying 1 followed by 60,000 zeroes. Some odds!)