It matters to those who want to understand the evidence of the world around them. It matters to those who want to understand the way the world works. It matters to those who are religious and want to understand how God created the universe.
To what end? If our species is essentially "perfect,"then we need to focus on
what it is now. The assumption that evolution theory can tell us much about man can lead to nasty conclusions, such as racial theory, which are leaps to judgement about the worth of certain kinds of human being. There has been since Darwin a tendency not to recognize that between the chimp and the human is a giant leap. But this is to depreciate the gifts of the chimp as well as those of the man. Human intelligence and animal intelligence are, all the evidence shows, of different kinds. But it is more just to recognize that the chimp is a chimp and not a defective man, and the human being is not a super chimp.