Has evolutionary science made visible contributions?

I was in a brief discussion with a theist the other day, and while discussing ID Vs. Evolution i noticed nothign has came out of ID that can be used to predict, advance human knowlege, or any real scientific evidence at all..

He asked me, well what has come out of evolutionary science. I replied, "Oh evolutionary biology has allowed us to create thousands of new drugs with the study of evolution"

He replied that evolution was not necessary in the creation of these products, that mere biology would be sufficient for their creation. Though, i am quite ignorant on specific drugs and/or contributions that evolutionary studies have contributed.

Can anybody post discoveries/inventions/or medicines that have been created from an evolutionary standpoint... (link?)

Genetic Algorithms
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html

Isn't evolution sort of a "uniting" theory for biology?

[a different tim]

defanatic wrote

Genetic Algorithms
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html

Isn't evolution sort of a "uniting" theory for biology?

Yes, it is. Also, you're right about the drugs - the understanding of evolutionary process is crucuial in antibiotic resistance for example. IDers tend to say things like "oh, we accept microevolution" but there's no difference between micro and macro evolution except timescale, so in fact they are working from an evolutionary framework too - they just don't want to admit it.

There's a page relevant to his general argument here

List of predictions made by evolutionary science, which have since panned out, here.

And, of course, genetic algorithms. You can get Tierra here.

It's also recently come to my attention that computer scientists use something like memeology in projects like Linux, which develop rapidly from the contributions of many thousands of hackers rather than the concerted effort of a couple programmers. The idea is that, given a running project, many people can give their ideas on how to improve it, thus providing the mutations that would go into a new generation. I don't think this process was designed specifically from evolutionary models, but it does demonstrate its power, and, recognizing that, it may be possible to develop more advanced models of productivity in all kinds of fields.

see The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric Raymond wrote

Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem

This link describes some items briefly:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA215.html