People have always gotten worked up over the origin of life as it is, and obviously people care about it because then they have to go through the rest of their life with the knowledge that they are (or the assertion that they are not) the product of a very long process involving a little bit of luck - not to mention being related to apes. Some people just can't handle that. Or they're too intellectually lazy to try and understand the process.

Actually, it's not evolution itself that's the issue - it's just become one of the hot topics in the tug-of-war between religious and secular ways of thinking. There's some deeper questions and problems involved, as anyone can see.