Does it matter if you don't believe in evolution?

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?