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Read an extended version of this article, and many more evolution myths, in our online special

So your brother or mother is a creationist. Let them believe what they want, you might think. After all, that makes family get-togethers a lot easier and it make no difference to anyone else.

Or does it? Imagine if Mike Huckabee ends up as vice-president of the US – a mere heart attack away from the top job. Would you feel comfortable if the world’s biggest superpower was run by a man who rejects evolution, thanks to the support of the tens of millions of people in the US who also cannot accept reality? It is dangerous when leaders prefer dogma to biological reality: Stalin’s support for the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko was a disaster for Soviet agriculture.

The success of western civilisation is based on science and technology, on understanding and manipulating the world. Its continued success depends on it, perhaps now more than ever as sources of cheap, easily available energy start to dry up and climate change kicks in. Any leader who thinks evolution is a matter of belief is arguably unfit for office. How can a leader capable of ignoring the staggering amount of evidence for evolution assembled by researchers in myriad fields possibly judge the more subtle scientific evidence for, say, climate change?

What’s more, evolution is directly relevant to many policy decisions. Infectious diseases from tuberculosis to wheat rust are making a comeback as they evolve resistance to our defences. Antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA are a growing problem. A deadly virus such as H5N1 bird flu or Ebola might evolve the ability to spread from human to human at any time, leading to a devastating pandemic. It is not possible to grasp how serious the threat is and plan for it unless you understand the power of evolution.

There are many more subtle areas where understanding evolution matters too. For instance, fishing policies that allow fishermen to keep only large fish are leading to the evolution of smaller fish. The tremendous changes we are making to the environment are altering many species, from rats becoming resistant to poisons to urban birds that are changing their songs to counter noise pollution (New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 29 March, p 33).

There is our future, too. Modern biology is on the brink of giving us previously unimaginable power over the human body, from reshaping embryos to rewriting the genetic code to delaying the effects of ageing. Societies’ views on if and how these powers should be used will inevitably be shaped by people’s understanding of their evolutionary origins. Things look rather different depending whether you think we are a perfect, finished product or a crude early prototype thrown up by a desperately cruel process from whose clutches we now have the opportunity to start to free ourselves.

This is not to say that evolutionary theory tells us how to run societies or make ethical decisions. It doesn’t. It is a descriptive science, not a prescriptive one. It does, however, help us to make informed decisions.

Read an extended version of this article, and many more evolution myths, in our online special