Creationists benefit in a real, direct way from the Theory of Evolution.
My intent in starting this thread is to help dispel the idea that the Theory of Evolution is simply an abstract theoretical construct that has had no positive impact on human society. I’m sure many creationists bristle at the thought of their tax dollars funding evolution research - perhaps comments here will ease their minds a bit.
The first direct benefit that comes to mind is the enhancement of medical research by the theory of evolution. Evolution serves as foundational principle of biology, including medical research. In the simplest sense, human relatedness to rodents allows medical research to use lab rats to accelerate research findings that would take much longer done only directly (and thus far more cautiously) in humans.
Since March is officially Colon Cancer Awareness Month (everybody get scoped!), I will use the following example - which supports both the importance of evolution to medical research, as well as the funding of basic research (research without obvious direct human benefit):__________________________________________
About fifteen years ago, human tumor research in
Bert Vogelstein’s lab group discovered that mutation of a gene called APC essentially causes colon cancer.
Even though cancer researchers only had a single gene, they immediately had understanding of the entire molecular pathway in which APC is involved, and immediately understood how loss of APC function resulted in uncontrolled growth of cancer cells.
How did they know this? Not from human studies, but rather from studies done on the lowly fruit-fly, years before.
Eric F. Wieschaus and Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard had done mutational studies to understand developmental pathways - these studies have had a tremendous impact on medicine, thus
the two won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their basic research. Part of their research elucidated the APC pathway, its molecular members, and how they interact to form a functional pathway.
The knowledge from fly research helped cancer researchers understand human colon cancer, and develop methods to study, screen for, and treat it.
One way research progressed was by
creating mice that get colon cancer through the manipulation of the genes known from fly research. These mice do indeed get colon cancer, and have served to greatly advance understanding of colon cancer as well as to test new treatments.
If you check out the mouse reference above, you’ll see that they mention other genes involved in colon cancer, including the mismatch repair genes MSH and MLH. While it might seem outlandish to many non-scientists,
the organism that has helped cancer researchers best understand the role of mismatch repair genes is yeast.__________________________________________
My point: Cancer researchers have been able to better understand and treat colon cancer by using knowledge and experiments done in other organisms, including such seemingly different organisms as flies and yeast. Without the theory of evolution, science would not have utilized the relatedness of organisms and their genetic/molecular pathways to reach this understanding. I see no way Creation Science thought would have followed the same research path I describe above.
Thus, if you are a Creationist, and you or someone you know has been treated for colon cancer in the past decade or two, you have benefited from the Theory of Evolution in a direct and meaningful way.
This is only one, quite specific example. Countless advances to medicine have relied upon the use of human relatedness to other organisms. I’m sure other, non-medical benefits of evolutionary theory are out there as well, such as improvements in agriculture.
Perhaps others can add their own direct benefits in this thread; and feel free to criticize my argument if you think I’m overstating the influence of evolutionary theory.
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