The WILD Foundation is commissioning a new hip-hop album entitled ”The Rap Guide to Wilderness” which I’m in the process of producing now! The songs are about how we relate to wild nature, its profound contribution to human wellbeing, and what we can do to ensure wilderness remains a part of our lives indefinitely. WILD.org is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo to fund the record, and the perks are pretty awesome, so I’m spreading the word. If you didn’t get in on my last campaign, or if you’re more into wilderness than science-of-religion (or if love of wilderness is your religion), this is a great project to support.

Check out The Rap Guide to Wilderness campaign on IndieGogo!

WILD.org is supporting me to bring in an awesome production team for this album including vocals and music from The Boom Booms, production and mix from Lin G, and beats from Soulful Spider and Tom Caruana, which is the same team that worked on my previous record “Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams”. And the campaign includes funds to make a music video to help launch the project. I’ll be performing songs from the album at the World Parks Congress in November, so please contribute what you can to this project (even a few bucks is a huge help), and share the link on social media.

The Rap Guide to Religion Premieres off-Broadway

Announcing a new off-Broadway theatre production, written and performed by Baba Brinkman, directed by Darren Lee Cole, and produced by Soho Playhouse Inc. The Rap Guide to Religion opened at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was met with rave reviews and audience acclaim. Now Soho Playhouse Inc is proud to present the show for a limited five-week engagement beginning October 8th. Full schedule and reservations are online here.

“Devilishly insightful and dazzlingly witty… a fringe must-see”  
★ ★ ★ ★ ★  Edinburgh Reporter

The Rap Guide to Religion is a new species of theatre, part hip-hop concert, part stand up comedy, and part TED Talk, exploring one of the most heated questions of our age: what’s the point of religion? Taking a scientific approach to the question, Canadian hip-hop artist Baba Brinkman performs faith-illuminating songs inspired by the best of cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and comparative anthropology, with examples from his own family history (Baba’s ultra-religious great great great grandparents sired more than 8,000 descendants). Audiences will discover the various ways and means by which religion evolves in our species, and will leave the show with a new appreciation of religion, and its critics.

“I had the time of my life. I love Brinkman’s blend of lecture hall, with vaudeville, with a studied and yet organic lyricism… real talk, in every sense.”
★ ★ ★ ★  Edinburgh Uncovered

A prolific writer, producer, and recording artist, Baba is currently working on the album version of The Rap Guide to Religion, supported by a successful campaign with more than 300 backers on Kickstarter. He recently released a preview EP “Religion Evolves” featuring songs from the show. He has also been commissioned to write and perform a new “Rap Guide to Wilderness” at the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia in November. Baba’s “Rap Guide” series also includes the award-winning “Rap Guide to Evolution” (“Astonishing and brilliant” NY Times).

“Irresistible lyricism… a fantastic show”
★ ★ ★ ★  A Younger Theatre

My Kickstarter campaign only has 58 hours left and it’s tantalizingly close! In the past week we’ve had more than 60 new backers and we’re now well over the 2/3 mark, 217 backers so far. Can we pull off the final 1/3 in less than 3 days?

Several amazing things have happened in the past few days that give me hope. Legendary evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski dropped $750 on the campaign, earning himself a custom-written rap song, and went on to tweet that he wants the song to be about his famous E. Coli experiment, tracking 60,000 generations of experimental evolution. Now that’s a rap I can’t wait to write!

Richard also complained that the $750 pledge doesn’t include the lower rewards which he also wants. Ask and ye shall receive. So I’m officially announcing that any contributions of $500 and up will now include the “Swag Pack” ($100 level) and the “Animated Character Based On You” ($250 level) if the backer so desires. Anyone want to increase their pledge?

Also, veteran mix engineer Bill Simpkins from Alpenglo Sound Studios wrote to offer a massive donation: he will mix the album free of charge (approximately $5,000 in value) if we hit the target! This means I’ll be able to spend more of the budget on awesome production value and animation, but only if we get there.

If you’re planning to back the project but were waiting until the end, now is the time!  Whatever you can contribute helps, and then please let people know that you are a backer via email and social media, and tell them why you want this project to succeed.

As for me, I want it to succeed because I have a story to tell. It’s the story of how religion came to be part of human nature, how it evolved, what its adaptive functions were, and how it might continue to evolve in the future, especially as more and more of us continue to identify as non-religious. To help me tell this story, I’ve enlisted input from world class scientists and researchers who study religion, and from an awesome team of music producers and animators. Hip-hop is the medium I work in, telling stories through songs and live performances and videos. Help me tell this story!

With appreciation,

Baba

Here’s my recent Scotsman blog outlining the five rap songs that capture something distinctive about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

In early May I gave a talk at TEDxNavesink in New Jersey, entitled “A Brief History of Rhyme,” detailing the emergence of polysyllabic rhyme patterns in both hip-hop and traditional literature. The talk was based on ideas I explored in the prologue to The Rap Canterbury Tales, published in 2006 by Talon Books. You can watch the TEDx Talk below.

Yesterday Jamie and I performed at the Octagon Theatre in Perth, the third stop on our nine-city Rap Guide to Evolution Down Under tour, including the Sydney Opera House June 18-21. Here’s all of the tour dates if you’re in Oz or have friends here who might want to catch the show. Check out the West Australian’s glowing 4.5/5 star review of last night’s show: The Evolution Will Not Be Televised.

In other recent events, I’ve been touring around the USA this Spring. We captured several more locations for the “Darwin’s America” documentary, including Texas and Alabama, where we also began shooting the upcoming music video for “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” with a group of conscientious college students keen to spread the evolutionary lovin’.

I also attended the Tucson Consciousness Conference where my wife Heather gave a talk and where I was performing as “The Reductionist Rapper,” charged with “reducing” the conference proceedings into a series of digestible rap summaries. The conference delivered a full six days of neuroscience and philosophy exploring the mystery of consciousness and how it might be scientifically explainable, and a highlight video of my final “rap up” performance is now available to watch on YouTube.

If you’re interested in the field, my raps were also integrated into a daily webcast called “Consciousness Central” which can be streamed here.

In other news, I wrote a piece about evolution and inequality for the Huffington Post which garnered 65 comments, a personal best for controversy, and I collaborated with the Perlstein Lab to explain the science of evolutionary pharmacology in an animated rap video, plus I gave a talk at TEDxNavesink about the history of rhyme from Chaucer to rap, which should be available online soon. Doing my best to keep it diverse over here!

Finally, if you’ve read this far you’re about to be rewarded with a delectable bit of news. I’ll be back at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer performing The Canterbury Tales Remixed at Underbelly, and also a new show, The Rap Guide to Religion, at the Gilded Balloon. No rest for the wicked!

So now that I’m officially working on a Rap Guide to Religion, I’m curious to hear from you all. What defines religious beliefs as opposed to other kinds of beliefs? How do you think the phenomenon is best explained, evolutionarily, psychologically, or sociologically? What religious behaviours do you think a “rap guide” needs to include to be comprehensive? I have a reading list I’m drawing inspiration from, but I’m open to suggestions as well, keeping in mind the show (and eventually the CD) can only be about an hour long.

I get emails from creationists occasionally, mostly good-natured ones rather than hate mail, but always disputatious in nature (of course). Recently I engaged in a dialogue with a family friend who is a creationist of the “your faith in science is no different than my faith in god” variety, and part of our disagreement came around to the question of whether the world is getting better or worse for people. This question isn’t central to whether or not evolution is true, but it may have a key role to play in the question of whether knowledge of evolution is useful.

As evidence for moral improvement, I cited Steven Pinker’s research on declining violence in The Better Angels of our Nature and in defence of moral regression my friend cited rising divorce rates and increasing narcissism, individualism, instant gratification, and the “subtle violence” that leads to “relationship breakdown.” As evidence for his view, he sent me a New York Times article entitled “Is The World More Depressed?”

So is the world more depressed? And if so what does that have to do with evolution? Here’s my response to my creationist friend in the form of a blog post.

The first thought that comes to mind is a question: once you’ve dismissed science as “a large, constantly shifting field of all kinds of contradictory theories,” how can you then go on to quote scientific studies in defence of your view that the world is getting worse? It seems to me you must either accept the findings of science as a by-and-large reliable guide to what is true and real (including the scientific evidence for evolution), in which case you must critique the findings of science using the tools of science when you think it has gone astray, or else you must cease and desist all reference to its findings. Any attempt to have it both ways, dismissing science in general while also citing it in defence of your views, strikes me as deeply hypocritical.

Moving on, I have another observation: the New York Times article you sent me attributes rises in stress and mental illness and depression to “Our awareness of other people and where we stand in social space” and points out that “We know that social position affects both when you die and how sick you get.” Note that the important thing here is social position, which means relative position. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much you have, what matters is how much you have compared to others around you. When the article states with confidence “we know that…” the writer is talking about knowledge based on scientific evidence, and here’s an excellent video that sums up the research admirably.

Now ask yourself: why would this be? What part of god’s plan would explain the fact that relative differences in wealth and resources are so much more important than absolute differences in wealth and resources? Does this interesting fact about human nature have anything whatsoever to do with Adam and Eve, or Moses, or Jesus? Is it predicted by the bible you believe in?

My point is this: the details only makes sense in light of our evolutionary history. The observed pattern is just as true of baboons as it is of humans. In primates, greater inequality in social status usually means greater inequality in survival and reproduction rates, which is why our stress hormones have evolved to be consistently sensitive to changes in rank. We are the descendants of primates who followed those hormonal triggers to evolutionary success.

What we’re observing is an evolved nature that’s poorly adapted to the modern world, because technology, urbanization, and even agriculture are relatively modern developments, and genetic evolution can’t keep up with cultural change. In some ways this is good, because cultural change has recently made us less racist and less sexist and less violent than the evidence suggests we used to be dozens or hundreds or tens of thousands of years ago. Culture can make us better people than we apparently evolved to be.

But the benefits of cultural change are not cost-free. Thanks to technology and media we have more people to compare ourselves to, more people to compete with, and more people to feel inferior to, and this constantly triggers stress hormones that harm our physical and mental health, just like it does in baboons only with greater intensity. So culture can also make us physically and mentally sicker than we evolved to be.

Jonathan Rottenberg’s new book “The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic” explores these links in much greater detail. I haven’t read it yet, but Maria Popova gives a nice overview in her recent Brainpickings post.

A better scientific understanding of the evolutionary factors at play here will help us to address the problems of depression and social disfunction more systematically and more effectively. I hope we share the common goal of increasing human wellbeing and reducing the amount of misery in the world. If so, science can help us towards that common goal, while the denial of science will only set us backwards.

So what do you think, is evolution worth a second look?

For more on the impact of inequality, I recommend:

A rap tribute to the countless biology teachers in the trenches of science literacy, teaching evolution to millions of students even in the face of religious objections. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, so they deserve our thanks and support.

We’re Making a Movie!

You heard it here first: we’re making a feature documentary about the Rap Guide to Evolution. The film, provisionally titled “Darwin’s America,” will be produced by Creative Chaos Ventures, a New York company whose most recent doc “Casting By” was a film festival favourite and HBO selection. Darwin’s America will follow The Rap Guide to Evolution as we tour the show to the places it’s needed most: the American South and current hotspots of “creationism vs evolution” conflict. Our aim is to engage and entertain, not belittle, and to explore the question: can a performance succeed where traditional arguments and education have failed to make an impact on people’s views about evolution?

The film commences shooting next week with my gig at Mississippi State University for their “Darwin Week” celebrations, followed by a show (for contrast) at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The rest of the tour stops will be spread through March and April with some additional filming in July, and we are aiming to include gigs in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky and Oklahoma, plus there is still space to add more locations, which is where you come in. If you know of a venue or an organization anywhere in America (red states preferred, but not required) that would like to host a Rap Guide to Evolution performance in March or April, please get in touch. Because of the film and the short lead time I can do the gigs for a fraction of my normal fee.

It’s exciting to be part of a project with a wide open and uncertain outcome, and I’ll keep you posted as the tour and filming process unfolds!