/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9884033
Historical evolutionary biology is sort of like fundamental particle physics. It's basic science, which isn't necessarily done because we know beforehand what technological or medical innovations it will lead to. The insights gathered from developing the techniques necessary to study it, will provide the groundwork for a lot of more directly "socially or economically relevant" science.

In the same way that the Large Hadron Collider (or alot of space and astronomy related science) had many engineering challenges that had to be solved, which led to innovations in engineering, optics, telecommunications, materials science, and manufacturing, doing basic research in evolutionary biology comes with having to overcome challenges which lead to innovations in biotechnology, medicine and so on.

There might not be any immediate benefit to knowing how exactly extant birds relate to dinosaurs (besides the pleasure that comes from thinking about history and how it all came to be the way it is today), but finding out that birds are related to dinosaurs took developing techniques in geology, biochemistry and so on that in turn have found application in medicine, forensics, pharmaceuticals etc. How these things lead to useful innovations in the future can't be reliably predicted, but the fact that they do is one of the reasons it is worth doing.