Why is the study of evolution important?

Evolution is amazing. Using some very simple rules, enormously complex systems formed themselves, and have proved to be amazingly adaptable. Life on Earth survived periods of terrible bombardment from space, survived choking volcanoes, ice ages, enormous asteroid strikes. Life on Earth survives underground, cut off from anything, in lava vents, and even survives being exposed to space and brought back. Evolution made all that possible.

Now suppose you need a similarly adaptable system for something like:

- a system to manage the energy grid and keep it working regardless of weather, demand and accidents;

- a biological system for generating new vaccines before new viruses get established;

- a system of small robots to go out and search the galaxy for other places for us to live.

What better way to know how to build such a system than to first understand how evolution works? After all, it's a lot easier to copy something that works than build it from scratch.

Besides, it's just really interesting to know where we came from and how.

We human beings have an enormous curiosity about the world and universe around us. We have always done research just to know stuff, not for any practical reason. Look at the Hubble Telescope, a very expensive project that has no real-world purpose, will not improve anyone's life. Look at the Large Hadron Collider--the people of Europe spent hundreds of billions of dollars to find subatomic particles that are so small we know know if they even exist.

But understanding evolution does have some practical benefits, in seeing how different species are related to each other, and how living things grow to suit their environment, and adapt to a changing environment. It's useful in developing new drugs, in medicine, biology, etc. In fact evolution has become the basis of all the 'life sciences'.

I can't give a very good answer, but I think a lot of it is for the understanding of species history, and the relationship between related and distant species. But I believe it's hoped that using our understanding of environmental effects on species and their evolution it may be possible to predict the effects of future events like global warming on them; how long it takes species to adapt, what ones are capable of adapting etc.

There's probably a lot more to it than that though.

It is to achieve an understanding; specifically, to understand WHY organisms are the way they are and (now with neodarwinism) HOW they got to be that way. It is an attempt to understand our own origins, so I guess you could say its goal to "achieve some greater end." That end is, in fact, to gain an understanding, so the question is somewhat circular.

The purpose is to disprove the existence of God because people don't want to have guilt when they have sex before marriage.