It seems so. This absurd "battle" recalls the Trial of Galileo. When the Church endorsed Ptolemaic nonsense over the truth, the great decline of the Catholic world began, and the subsequent rise of the Protestant Northern Europe. If we let people who reject science win again, it will be the United States which suffers this time.
Grandiose.
Doubting the overreaching claims of evo will bring about the end of the world? Maybe as you know it. It might bring about the end of some grants--there's a lot of science, probably most, that can make use of evo as a model and not buy in at all to the grander claims of evos.
Evo as a model is vital. As anything else? Just a Nat'l Geo pastime. Like cosmology, archeology, paleontolgy--interesting, but ultimately so speculative because it is unaccountable. The real scientist is accountable--if he's creating a new med, he might kill people. That keeps him from making ridiculous claims and daydreaming through beautfiul artists' renderings of the dinosaur world. We can't really afford all the daydreamers, anyway--the accountable science is expensive enough.