Generally no, they will ignore meta tags and do whatever they please.
As stevemegson notes, the description meta tag is useful for providing your own description to display on the SERP (no guarantees it will be used).
Heres a great quote from the Wiki page for Meta_Tag:
Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.