Why Does Evolution Matter?

Grains, such as wheat and corn provide 75% of the food the world eats. Today, a corn plant produces twice the grain it did 30 years ago, and probably 10 times what it could a century ago. Why? Because we know -- we have found out -- that living things are changeable. Over many generations we can change them into things that serve us better. Nowadays we do it very systematically and on purpose. We've done it more haphazardly for thousands of years. Somewhere in our dim past we discovered that if we mate our best plants and animals, or save the best seeds, and destroy or eat the less perfect ones, each generation will get slightly better -- morefit, by our standards. But corn, for instance, is still being improved, and still has enemies. One way we could improve it is to find its wild ancestor, the native grass that our ancestors started cultivating. The problem is that we have changed corn so much that it now looks very different from any wild grasses. But understanding that corn has evolved has allowed agricultural researchers to find its wild cousin. Now, using the science of genetics, we can "borrow" genes from that relative to improve corn. We are making it more resistant to disease and insects, and more tolerant of salt and drought.

That's one thing we can do with a knowledge of evolution and genetics: feed a hungry world. Research into improving animals - livestock - is just as dependent on modern evolutionary biology. 

If you want to see evolution in action, all you have to do is look for things with very short times between generations: insects, for instance. A major problem with bugs (from our point of view) is that their generations are so short that they can evolve fast. So what? So every farmer must be painfully aware that he has to be very careful about how he uses pesticides. If he uses too much, too often, he may force bugs to evolve rapidly and become resistant, so that the poison no longer kills them.

There are many pesticides that are now useless, because the bugs they were used on have evolved into something that is no longer bothered by those poisons. They may not be new species yet, but they are no longer the same insects, either. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the multi-national, multi-billion-dollar agribusinesses take evolution very seriously.

(From: http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/articles/why_evolution_matters.html)

Humans have a lot of diseases we don’t want. The problem is a lot of diseases are caused by bacteria or viruses that, just like us, want to survive and multiply! Our main weapons against bacteria are antibiotics. These are drugs that act a bit like your body does in response to bacteria. They latch on to the outside of the bacteria and recruit our body’s killer cells to come along and eat the bacteria.

But many bacteria have evolved to avoid the antibiotics, which then become a bit useless really! So lots of people who are sick with things like colds, or even worse, can’t be helped. Understanding how the bacteria evolve is really important if we want to avoid being completely helpless to fight back against them!

(From: http://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/index.php?page_id=j4)