The American Journal of Physics article by Daniel Styer which was offered as a “concise refutation” to my Applied Mathematics Letters article by the blogger whose letter apparently triggered the withdrawal of my AML article is possibly the dumbest work ever published by a major physics journal. To demonstrate how absurd the logic in this article is, I wrote a little satire ( here ) which extends Styer’s attempts to quantitatively demonstrate that the decrease in entropy of the universe due to biological evolution is easily “compensated” by the increase in the “cosmic microwave background”, to the game of poker.
I submitted this satire to the American Journal of Physics this morning, just to see what reason they would give for not wanting to correct the errors in the Styer piece. As cynical as I have become, I still was not prepared for this answer, which I received a few hours later:
I do not see any educational value in your manuscript. Because it is well established in the physics community that there is no conflict between the second law of thermodynamics and evolution, we can consider manuscripts which help students understand why. However, papers that promote views that are contrary to accepted understanding in physics should be sent to research journals not to AJP.
In other words, we will print anything that supports the accepted view, no matter how stupid, and won’t consider anything that challenges it, no matter how logical.
Any suggestions as to which “research journals” might consider papers which “promote views that are contrary to accepted understanding?”