In the letter "Article assumes theory of Big Bang is a fact" (April 4) the author paints himself as someone who obviously has no understanding of thermodynamics. If he had bothered to actually look up the second law in any physics textbook, he would see that he had misquoted the law itself.

The law states that any closed system left to itself will tend from a state of higher order towards a state of greater disorder. He uses his misinterpretation of the law to argue that evolution violates the second law. It does not, because the Earth is not a closed system. While life on Earth has tended to increase in complexity, it has not been gaining this complexity at no cost. The sun is the energy source which powers life on earth and the sun has lost much, much more order in the process of powering our little planet than life on Earth has gained. This loss of order and energy is why the sun will cease to shine in about 5 billion years.

The reasons why the first law is not violated are more complex, but the second law has been sufficient to show the ignorance of the author. He should return to some of the basic science classes that he suggests scientists return to.