For kicks last week I was reading an anti-evolution blog post  (cause that’s how I roll) that included the notion, and I paraphrase, "why does all this matter, it’s all in the past, let’s move on".  Now, the person making that statement was a non-scientist, and there is no shortage of similar nonsense out in the internets by people undisciplined by facts, so why do I note this now?  Because coincidently I attended a workshop on forestry genomics where one of the presenters put up the cover of the Extended Phenotype, citing the concept of the gene as the unit of selection, in contrast to the organism, as a way to inform analysis of genomics approaches to the Mountain Pine Beetle disaster here in BC.  Having just completed it, mention of the book caught my attention.  He went on to say that, from a gene’s perspective,the Pine Beetle is an insect-fungal hybrid, and the complexity of interactions among these genomes and the genome of the host tree as they adapt to each other is key to combating the blight.  In other words, a conceptual model based on standard Darwinian theory informs scientific inquiry into a current problem. 

This is why good theories (in this case Darwin’s natural selection and Dawkin’s Selfish Gene) persist – they are useful.  They generate testable hypotheses and inform research every single day.  Unlike intelligent design theory, which is utterly useless in shedding light on any given set of observations.