What use is evolution to anybody?
The Theory of Relativity is useful because it includes a series of formulas with practical applications such as GPS and nuclear power plants. Quantum mechanics allows us to construct ultra-accurate clocks, microscopes that allow us to extend our visual sense to the smallest of things, and uncrackable codes. Our knowledge of the physical world through physics and chemistry underlie the technics of the modern world and have led to better understanding of the mechanics of biology, and thereby improved public health measures and medicine.
Science also informs about who we are and the nature of the world of which we are a part. We interpret basic scientific data in a way that makes sense to us. Dissecting the world into smaller and smaller bits has brought us quantum physics. Some of the ideas we’ve come up with include that these smallest of events are weird, being both waves and particles and affecting one another over huge distances. Not only that, they seem to be subjective and that given a choice, all paths are taken. These are interpretations of the formulas that describe the relationships between what we are observing and measuring. Quantum mechanics says none of these things; such statements come about in our efforts to translate the facts into the language of daily life.
When dealing with genetics and the fossil record, we try to imagine how these pieces all fits into the larger mosaic of life on earth. Evolution is actually a collection of interpretations, which themselves are a composite of ideas about matter and how it behaves, from its most basic atomic and molecular properties, to those of very complex organisms and ultimately ourselves. It involves a series of assumptions that typically include the primacy of matter. The genome, the DNA in our bodies, which if collected and joined together from every cell in our body would stretch to about twice the diameter of the Solar System, is information in action and as part of the cell it is responsible for our development, growth and maintenance; it is believed to have shaped itself through it’s inherent physical properties. The information in the form of base pair sequences, would have been added over time from some primordial state, resulting in bacteria, algae, fungi, grasses, fir trees, fish and frogs, dinosaurs and geese, peacocks and moles, lions and antelopes. We can’t replicate this of course, as grapes remain grapes, dogs are still dogs, cattle is cattle, horses remain horses and people are people. The pieces don’t really fit together, but evolution is the current widely held world view.
The use for evolution is intellectual, providing a collective understanding of how the world works and our place in it. Outside that psychosocial context, whose evolution is never explained without some god or randomness of-the-gaps thrown in, we couldn’t be discussing our vision of how our sitting here communicating came about.
