Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.” Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?,” reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, Vol 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006).
So why is teaching it supposed to be so important, apart from spreading the new atheism of which it is the creation story, and Coyne seems to be a proponent?
Are there countries with where new atheism is not the established religion?
Note: In the context, “evolution” typically means Darwinism, the “free money” claim that natural selection action on random mutation can create large amounts of complex information. There are good reasons for believing it is untrue.
That, not what dying TV’s braindeads tell us about the “issues of our time”, is the true controversy. Heck, what they are doing isn’t even good TV any more, and they know it. But they can’t stop. They don’t know anything better.
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