I understand what Faith is asking for with “everyday science”. I also understand what she doesn’t see about ToE theory underpinning everything we do in biology. So I will try to provide an example of how evolution, specifically ”macroevolution’ affects my everyday work.
As an aside to my research I maintain a public aquarium that displays sea life endemic to the Gulf of Alaska. We are a very popular attraction to visitors in our town. Especially popular are living examples of species that people are familiar with from restaurants, halibut, salmon, prawns, and the ever-popular Alaskan king crab.
Now king crabs are very difficult to keep. They nearly always die when it comes time to molt. Obviously they molt dozens of times in the wild, so it is problematic that they die when kept in aquaria. Because these are such a valuable commercial species a great deal of research has been put into ways of propagating them to augment natural stocks (which have, in many places, been depleted). Other commercially important crab species, such as Dungeness crab, snow crab, blue crab, and stone crabs do very well in aquaria. They molt successfully without problem.
So the question is, why do king crabs die during molts when other crabs do just fine when in captivity? The answer is that king crabs are not true crabs at all. They are an example of convergent evolution. King crabs are actually highly modified hermit crabs. Hermit crabs have a greatly decalcified exoskeleton. This means that except for the legs, head, and carapace shield the rest of their body is soft. Because of this decalcification they have lost the ability to extract calcium from seawater and have to rely on dietary calcium to make a new exoskeleton. This is most likely analogous to the vitamin C issue in most primates (probably a broken gene that had little consequence in the ancestral population).
So king crabs (about ten commercially important species worldwide) have re-evolved a strongly calcified exoskeleton. With this has become a need for enormous need for dietary calcium during molting. In the wild king crabs literally wipe out sea urchin and sea star populations in their habitat during molting times. To keep them alive in aquaria we feed them as many sea urchins as we can as well as a supplemental diet (suggested by another researcher) of cuttlebone mixed with fish.
What does this have to do with ”macroevolution’? If we accept the baramin concept of kinds, then crabs should be crabs. Hermit crabs should do their thing and true crabs should do theirs. A researcher (or aquaculturist) should be able to apply what he or she knows to crabs and hermit crabs to their maintenance. Recognizing members of the family Lithodidae (we have 24 species in our region) as derived hermit crabs enables me to provide the diet they require rather than treating them like true crabs. I discuused their evolution here: http://
EvC Forum: Transitional fossils not proof of evolution? -->
EvC Forum: Transitional fossils not proof of evolution?
So in my everyday work understanding the evolutionary history of an organism benifits me. And it is not 'microevolution'. A typical hermit crab and a king crab are by no defintion the same 'kind'. So that is an everyday scientific application of the the ToE.
Doctor Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which were true and which weren't?"
Elim Garak: "My dear Doctor, they're all true"
Doctor Bashir: "Even the lies?"
Elim Garak: "Especially the lies"
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