Visit www.evolutionarytales.com for info and tickets.

Rap Guide to Evolution, Canterbury Tales Remixed, and Ingenious Nature have all had their off-Broadway premieres as separate productions, and now they will transfer to the Player’s Theatre to run in rotation for a month, a hip-hop science and storytelling extravaganza!

My hope is that we can extend the run past June 23rd, but that will depend entirely on audience response. This is a never-before-tried experiment, and my hope is that running the three shows back to back will create a synergy with cross-pollination effects that spill over in unexpected ways. My hope is also that I can keep the three scripts separate in my head.

Another exciting bit of news is that the World Science Festival will be presenting The Rap Guide to Evolution as part of their official programming on opening weekend, at a discounted rate.

I’d like to say a special thanks to the 250 crowdfunders who helped to make this vision come to reality. Looking forward to being back in action with Mr. Simmonds on the turntables, rocking off-Broadway soon!

Soho Playhouse Inc in Association with Thinking Animals Inc

The Science of Rhyme: An Evening of Neuro-Lyricism

April 16th, 7-9pm
218 E 25th Street
RSVP: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/store/29885/donate/21805

In an exciting merging of science and stagecraft, hip-hop playwright Baba Brinkman and Cognitive Neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin will explore together how our brains are wired for “improvisational creativity”.

Dr. Berlin will present exciting new research on the neural basis of both musical and lyrical improvisation. Drama Desk Award Nominee and off-Broadway sensation Baba Brinkman, creator of The Canterbury Tales Remixed and The Rap Guide to Evolution, will perform excerpts of his work and take suggestions from attendees for on-the-spot improvisation.

With accompanying turntablism (improvised recombination of pre-recorded sounds) by DJ Jamie Simmonds, this will be an evening of entertainment and erudition, fabulous food and drink, and unscripted merrymaking.

Monies raised will go to support Brinkman and Simmonds’ “Darwin Meets Chaucer Off-Broadway” production, the first-ever hip-hop theatre cycle in New York!

Darwin Was Right

Only seven days left to help me spread the word!

I wrote the Rap Guide to Evolution to help people achieve a better understanding of Darwin’s theory, including how it works and what it means in terms of our past, our future, and our sense of purpose in the present. When I perform the show with Jamie Simmonds on the turntables, we make audiences laugh, make them shout, and make them think. Here’s some pics from a performance we did at Williams College, MA a few weeks ago.

Right now we’re raising the funds to continue celebrating Darwin off-Broadway in New York, as part of a cycle including The Canterbury Tales Remixed and Ingenious Nature. The other two shows have their own mission statements: to share the greatest stories ever told, and to apply the science of psychology to my personal quest for a mate.

Please help support our crowdfunding campaign in its final week! Here’s the link: http://www.indiegogo.com/DarwinChaucer

Rewards for donating range from digital downloads, signed CDs, freestyle phone messages, “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” T-shirts, and VIP tickets to the show, and even original rap recordings and private gigs. Claim yours!
By the way, in case you’re wondering how my quest for a mate is going, I seem to have succeeded against the odds. I was looking for someone with whom I could share chemistry while agreeing it’s literally caused by chemistry, a woman I could romance with all my soul, and with a shared understanding that the soul is made of neurons. In accordance with my show’s ethos, I was looking for someone who didn’t consider my naturalistic leanings “mean”. Well, I met her just over six months ago, and Florida’s Palm Beach New Times recently outed us in an article that concludes: “Brinkman did finally find a soul-mate with enough brain power to match his own.”

Yes, Spring is in the air, filled with the blossomings of geek love. Now if I can just get this next production funded…

1. She is the only candidate with a strong track record of success across multiple domains: getting elected, running a business, raising a family, and protecting the environment.
2. She has taken the problem of global warming seriously for longer than any other candidate – from her 1992 Masters Thesis onward it has been one of her main areas of expertise and focus. That’s one of the reasons David Suzuki supports her.
3. She understands good government policy better than any other candidate, and better than most politicians. You can see this principle across her platform, from specifics like legalizing and taxing cannabis to the grand vision of a “sustainable society”.
4. She is the only candidate with a clear path to victory, through her plan to cooperate with the other parties against the Harper conservatives. Every other candidate will leave the left split and the conservatives in power longer.
5. She’s just a wonderful person, full of intelligence, positivity, and integrity, a person whose whole life has been about service to others. I should know, she’s my mom.

Conclusion: Joyce is the right choice! I believe this so strongly that I put my limited hip-hop street cred on the line (again) to record her a mama’s boy rap song, check it out:

Convinced? Here are five actions you can take to make politics in Canada something to be proud of:

1.  Most important! Sign up as a “Supporter” for free on Joyce’s website. This will give you a vote in the leadership election in April, but hurry, the signup deadline is March 3rd!
2. Donate! Political campaigns are run with dollars, not just good vibes. Plus, because of the tax refunds, you’ll get most of your money back. Donating $100 will only cost you $25. I donated $1,200 and I’m a self-employed artist.
3. Volunteer! You can join Joyce’s team and help with events and social media outreach. It’s easy and fun and you’ll make new friends.
4. Tell your friends and family. For many of us, the only advertisements we’ll listen to anymore are personal recommendations. So tell a few of your friends what you like about Joyce’s vision and ask for their support.
5. Spread my video. This one is less important than any of the above, but sometimes a cheeky bit of fun is the best way to break the ice.

Politics can be tedious, but we should all agree that our environment is worth protecting and our friends shouldn’t be locked up for smoking a joint. The real question is, what are we going to do about it? Supporting Joyce is one thing you can do. So do it!

For the record, I have planted more than a million trees, and so has my brother and several of my close friends. My mom, Joyce Murray, who is currently running for Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, has planted more than half a million. Don’t believe me? Read on.

Yesterday I got a cheerful email from a couple of mathematics professors at University of Massachusetts, Boston, informing me that they were using me as a case study for teaching “Quantitative Reasoning” and applied mathematics to undergraduates, and that I was even referenced in a math problem in their textbook. I felt so proud! You can view the full problem here (page 8), but I’ll just quote from the opening lines:

Here are the instructions for the videos I need. Please forward widely and quickly!

1. Download or stream the song from here: http://bababrinkman.bandcamp.com/album/cooperation-time

2. Play the song on any speakers, and film yourself on a camera phone singing along with the chorus only (it starts at 0:57). Frame the video head and shoulders, the same as the generic Facebook Icon, in a well-lit place. The sound doesn’t matter since this is a music video. What matters is lip-syncing in time with the music!

Here are the lyrics:

Politicians have got to know
We want cooperation
Stephen Harper has got to go
Together we can make him

Politicians have got to know
We want cooperation
Stephen Harper has got to go
Tell a fellow Canadian

3. Do a little funny/happy dance for ten seconds on camera after the chorus ends. Video length: about 30 seconds.

4. Repeat this process with three friends, one video each. The more diversity in age, ethnicity, gender, and personal style the better.

5. Upload the videos to dropbox.com (free to join), put it in a folder, and share it with me at info(at)babasword(dot)com

6. Wait 2-3 days for the video to be released on YouTube, featuring you and many others, all supporting Joyce.

Hurry please! The supporter signup deadline is on March 3rd and I want to make this video go viral at least a week in advance!

But for now I’m writing because Jamie and I have a brand new live comedy hip-hop album, Ingenious Nature, recorded at the Soho Playhouse January 6th 2013. Click on the album artwork to preview it.

This album is not available for streaming or download anywhere else, and it’s not on iTunes. Instead, it’s only available to my actual supporters, of which I hope you are one!

The album can only be downloaded as a reward for funding our IndieGogo campaign to get all three of off-Broadway shows, Rap Guide to Evolution, Canterbury Tales Remixed, and Ingenious Nature, running in rotation at the Players Theatre in New York this Spring. The three shows work as a cycle, an intellectual hip-hop theatre triptych, and if we succeed we’ll be doing something never-before-tried!

If you’re able to contribute something to the campaign, I would be eternally grateful, and will shower you with delightful personalized rewards! The digital download is just the beginning. Go to the campaign homepage to see what I mean.

Either way, I hope you will help me spread the word. We only have 14 days left to raise the money!

I normally use this blog to talk about my own projects and events, but this one isn’t about me, it’s about my mother, Joyce Murray.

She’s running for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and has a bold plan to cooperate with the other left-leaning parties (the NDP and Green Party) on a one-time basis for the singular purpose of ending Stephen Harper’s slimy grip on Canadian politics and passing electoral reform so that no party can ever again hold a “majority” with only 38% of the vote.

Details of her plan are below, but the key thing is that anyone can participate, as long as they are Canadian and not a card-carrying member of another political party. You can sign up for free on her website as a “supporter” and have your say in Canada’s future.

Joyce is also championing some other great initiatives such as pricing carbon to get Canada’s greenhouse gas output under control, legalizing and taxing cannabis, and better representation for women in public appointments.

If you’re sick of Harper’s divisive, authoritarian, anti-science, environmentally irresponsible policies, this one is a no-brainer. Sign up!

Okay, over to you mom…

Febuary 5, 2013 It’s an exciting time to be a Liberal Member or Supporter! We are rebuilding our party to be the party Canadians look to for leadership in 2015. And you’ve been clear: inspiring Canadians to vote again is a priority for our party.Renewing democracy and making our political system fair and representative is a goal I share. But it simply won’t happen as long as Stephen Harper remains Prime Minister. I am the only leadership candidate with a plan to defeat Stephen Harper and use the principle of proportional representation to reboot our broken electoral system.In 2011 we lost in 57 ridings where Conservatives won with less than 50% of the vote. I propose that in those ridings, we cooperate with other parties to run a single progressive candidate who can take the seat from Stephen Harper. Let’s give local riding associations the power to cooperate with other parties and figure out how, riding by riding, we can defeat the Conservatives.This plan will only work if people outside our Party, and those who have turned away from politics entirely, become interested and decide to help. That’s why I made this video - a call to action – inviting them to become Supporters and join us to defeat Stephen Harper. Please pass it on to your friends, Liberal and non-Liberal alike! Naturally, people are worried by the idea of doing things differently. I’d say that doing things the same these past years got us where we are now. It’s time to be brave and take initiative, putting Canada’s interests first. We are Canadians. Principled cooperation is what we do! In fact, the Liberal minority governments of the 60s and 70s left the legacy they did because they were prepared to cooperate with different parties to better the lives of all Canadians. Cooperation is not a coalition or merger. We would still nominate a Liberal in every riding. Cooperation is simply a plan for a primary-type runoff to choose the strongest progressive candidate who can defeat a Conservative in select ridings. Cooperation would be democratic, transparent and voluntary, with local Liberal riding associations making the decision whether or not to participate. Cooperation would be a one-time deal, followed by real electoral reform to ensure future elections respect the votes of every Canadian. Cooperation is a win-win solution. We’re not sacrificing Liberal values, we’re ensuring a future for the full spectrum of political choice in Canada. At the same time, we will have nothing to lose by cooperating because we are rebuilding the Liberal Party into an option Canadians can feel proud to support. My plan simply gives us a safety net that ensures Stephen Harper is defeated in the next election. Let’s continue the momentum that began when Liberal Party members decided to open up our party and build a strong, diverse Liberal movement, reinforced by brand-new Supporters. Please join me in sharing the video widely and help change the course of Canadian political history in 2015. Let’s build a Canada that is economically, environmentally and democratically sustainable. Best regards, Joyce Murray Candidate for Liberal Party Leader Sign up as a SUPPORTER in 30 seconds. www.joycemurray.ca _________________________________________________ C’est excitant d’être un membre ou un sympathisant du Parti libéral par les temps qui courent. Nous rebâtissons notre parti pour que les Canadiennes et les Canadiens reconnaissent notre leadership en 2015. Vous avez été clairs : Inspirer les Canadiens pour qu’ils retournent aux urnes est une priorité pour notre parti. Le renouvellement de notre démocratie pour que notre système politique soit équitable et représentatif est un but que je partage. Mais nous n’y arriverons pas tant que Stephen Harper est premier ministre. Je suis la seule candidate à la chefferie qui a un plan pour remettre notre système électoral sur la bonne voie. En 2011, nous avons perdu 57comtés où des conservateurs ont gagné avec moins de 50 % des voix. Je propose que dans ces comtés nous coopérions avec les autres partis progressistes et qu’un seul candidat soit présenté afin de déloger le candidat de Harper. Donnons aux associations de comtés le pouvoir de déterminer le moyen de coopérer à cette fin avec les autres partis. Comté par comté, nous pouvons assurer la défaite des conservateurs. Ce plan ne peut réussir que si des personnes qui ne sont pas de notre Parti ou qui se sont entièrement détournées de la politique deviennent intéressées et décident d’aider.Voilà pourquoi j’ai fait ce vidéo - un appel à l’action – les invitant à devenir sympathisants et à se joindre à nous pour sonner la défaite de Harper. Transmettez- le donc à vos amis, qu’ils soient libéraux ou non! Il est naturel que l’idée de faire les choses autrement déstabilise les gens. Je vous dirais que c’est d’avoir fait la même chose pendant des années qui nous a mis dans le pétrin où nous sommes. Il est grand temps d’être brave et de prendre l’initiative pour le bien de notre pays! La coopération n’est pas une coalition ni une fusion. Chaque comté nommerait un candidat libéral. Ceci est simplement un plan pour un scrutin de ballottage du type des primaires américaines pour choisir le candidat progressiste le plus apte à défaire le candidat conservateur dans des comtés ciblés. La coopération serait démocratique, transparente et volontaire. Chaque association de comté serait libre de participer ou non. La coopération serait une action ponctuelle, qui serait suivie par une vraie réforme électorale pour qu’à l’avenir les élections respectent le vote de chaque Canadien. La coopération est une solution gagnante. Nous ne sacrifions pas nos valeurs libérales. Nous faisons en sorte qu’à l’avenir nous ayons accès au spectre complet de choix politiques au Canada. Nous n’avons rien à perdre à coopérer. Parce que nous rebâtissons le Parti libéral afin qu’il soit une option à laquelle les Canadiens seront fiers d’adhérer. Mon plan de coopération nous assure un moyen efficace pour défaire Harper aux prochaines élections. Profitons de l’impulsion qui nous a été donnée par les membres qui ont décidé d’ouvrir notre parti pour bâtir un mouvement fort, diversifié et revigoré par de tout nouveaux sympathisants. Je vous prie de vous joindre à moi et de partager ce vidéo le plus largement possible pour aider à changer le cours de l’histoire du Canada en 2015. Bâtissons un Canada dont l’économie, l’environnement et la démocratie seront durables. Au plaisir, Joyce Murray Candidate à la chefferie du Parti libéral Il suffit de 30 secondes pour vous inscrire en tant que Sympathisant  www.joycemurray.ca

Three weeks ago we finished up the initial run of Ingenious Nature, and immediately an offer came up to extend not just that show but all three of my shows, at a better-located theatre right on NYU’s main campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. The producers of Rap Guide to Evolution, Canterbury Tales Remixed, and Ingenious Nature would have to combine forces to make this happen, and they are now ready to partner on the project, but we have to raise the funds first.

So I’m starting a crowdfunder drive with IndieGogo to get this never-before-tried theatre experiment launched. If successful, we’ll run all three productions in rotation for one month off-Broadway, with two performances of The Rap Guide to Evolution and one each of the other two shows every week. And if that month goes well, we can extend this run indefinitely.

Take a moment to check out the perks on the campaign homepage: Darwin Meets Chaucer Off-Broadway

In return for your contribution to the crowdfunder drive, you can claim all kinds of rewards, including exclusive Evolution T-Shirts, a digital download of our new live Ingenious Nature CD, VIP tickets to the shows, even exclusive performances and original raps written on a theme of your choice!

If you’ve been meaning to book me for an event, but thought you didn’t have the budget, check out the live performance options. Or, if you just like the idea of promoting the works of Darwin and Chaucer to a wider audience, contribute what you can. And either way please tweet and share the link with your friends!

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes, and look forward to seeing what kind of response we get.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Ingenious Nature’s Final Weekend

NY Times Publishes a Review and Video

Ingenious Nature moves into its final weekend tonight, with only three shows left in our run, and things have really picked up, with crowds of sixty or more every night, and a good chance to extend the run through the Spring. But I’d better not get ahead of myself.

The New York Times finally gave us some love, not in the form of a positive review, but via a video segment feature for their “In Performance” Arts series. The Times did publish a review of the show, but it was uniformly sourpuss and virtually unquotable, like several others we received.

There has been an interesting and not-entirely-unpredictable trend in the reviews, a trend that fits very well with the show’s “sex differences in psychology” theme. Most of the reviews from men have been admiring and positive, and most of the reviews from women have been indignant and negative. The male exception is this curmudgeonly review from an older man, and the female exception is this friendly interview/feature from an NYU science journalism masters student. If you want to see all of the reviews in round-up, they are available via my website’s theatre page.

Several post-show discussions with the staff and friends have centred around this trend, and the question of whether the negative reaction from some women is due to actual misogyny in the script, or due to subtleties of tone, or due to the obvious fact that some people just can’t take a joke (because they feel a moral responsibility to enforce taboos). There most certainly is misogyny in the script; the subject is explicitly addressed, along with some speculation about its possible biological origins (ie the male fear of cuckolding). It’s probably a mix of all three, but rest assured the whole process has led to some soul-searching, and has caused the show (and hopefully the playwright) to evolve.

I’d like to think the middling reviews are mostly due to the common fallacy that plagues evolutionary psychology, ie confusing explanation with exculpation. But this is theatre not science journalism, so I take the feedback about tone and timing seriously. The NY Times review calls the show a “rant” which is very far from my intention. Hence, I am now endeavouring to fine-tune the degree to which I tell the story of sex differences in psychology with a brighter twinkle in my eye and a smoother tongue in my cheek.

If you’re in NYC, come see one of the final three shows and decide for yourself whether I’ve crossed the line. Tonight my guest on stage will be Christopher Chabris, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla, one of the books that most influenced the writing of the show.

Happy New Year to all, and stay tuned for the wrap-up!

Teachers! I need feedback on the educational use of my videos.

Please fill out this survey.

Download The Rap Guide to Human Nature

Yesterday we performed for a crowd of about 45 people, including Martin Daly, co-author of the Evolutionary Psychology classic Homicide, which inspired several sections of the show, as well as the song Survival of the Fittest from The Rap Guide to Evolution. This is one thing I absolutely love about my job: I will read a book that hugely impresses me, write a song to bring the book’s best ideas to a wider audience, and before long I find myself at Manhattan’s finest seafood restaurant with the book’s author and a group of new friends, discussing evolution, religion, philosophy, and the origins of human behaviour, until midnight over wine and oysters.

An Evolutionary Psychology Classic

Martin Daly was only the latest of several inspiring academics to pass through the Soho Playhouse over the past few weeks, including Christopher Emdin and Gary Marcus, part of our “Human Nature Talkback Series” connecting the show’s audience with leading thinkers in science and education. Later this week (December 20) my guest on stage will be Jonathan Haidt, and on January 4th it will be Christopher Chabris, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla.

So the science community is loving the show, and the same seems to be true of the hip-hop community. On opening night we had Tonedeff and PackFM from QN5 (a couple of legendary underground rappers) sitting in the front row, and later today Jamie and I will be guests on their popular Tacos and Chocolate Milk Podcast. We’ve also had a steady stream of rappers, DJs, and singers from the Freestyle Mondays scene passing through the show (Shouts out to Milkmoney, Mariella, Rosa, Benny Els, Apple Juice, Grey Matter, Blitzkreig, Chaz Kangas, BS, Bobby Marino, Hired Gun, Rabbi Darkside, Skittelz, and Dyalekt).

Even though the science and hip-hop responses have been stronger than ever, the critical response has been a lot more mixed. My goal with this show was to popularize the findings of science by personalizing and dramatizing them through comedy, music, and character-driven theatre. The danger in this sort of endeavour is that the show might come across as “too scientific,” alienating people who aren’t aware of, or interested in, the science behind the story. For instance, the first review of the show to appear online, from Backstage.com, sported the unsubtle headline: “Ingenious Nature is Too Scientific”.

That was the first of several reviews that “just didn’t get it,” although the others appear to have more of a beef with hip-hop than with science. Both Lighting and Sound America and CurtainUp.com decided to fault me by faulting rap, the former by declaring that “rap, by its very nature, consists of torrents of words that don’t allow for much emotional variety” and the latter by going after the “hokey” hip-hop trope of “using demonstrative hand symbols to illustrate lyrics.” It’s interesting that this kind of “genre-bashing” critical response was entirely absent from both of the previous two rap/theatre hybrid shows we did off-Broadway.

Still, most of the reviews have been primarily or entirely positive. Theater Mania calls the show “brilliant and bizarre” while the New Yorker says it ”feels like a mash-up of ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ and ‘Sex and the City’ as performed by a young Eminem,” an experience that (in typically aloof New Yorker parlance) is “not without charm.” The Associated Press calls it “a unique theatrical experience” and Exeunt Magazine gives it four stars and calls it “winkingly funny,” all-in-all a (partial) critical triumph!

So there’s the science, hip-hop, and critical responses, now what about the all-important popular response? That’s been the most topsy-turvy of all. On opening night we had a hundred people in the crowd, which was awesome, but on the night after opening we had only five (5!) people in the house, which is heavy lifting for a show as high-energy as this one. We performed for five that night, but the following Thursday we only had three, and instead of powering through that show I just talked to them and asked them to come another night when there’s a crowd, which means we actually cancelled a show due to low sales. The shame!

Actually those days were outliers, and almost every other night the audience has at least been over twenty, but in a 200-seater that still feels quiet. So I’m in the odd position of having a fun, smart, critically-mostly-acclaimed show off-Broadway that is not filling up. What to do? One ray of hope is that the mighty New York Times has already been in to see the show, a week ago, but they haven’t published their review yet. As I learned in 2010, a kick-ass NY Times review can sell out a show in a matter of hours, so every morning I check the Arts section with baited breath, and will continue to do so until it appears, like Tom Hanks in Castaway scanning the horizon for a ship.

Another ray of hope is all of y’all. We continue for exactly three more weeks, closing on January 6th, so if you live in New York, buy yourself some tickets. Or, if you don’t, buy your friend who lives in New York some tickets. And if you want to organize a large group to come, I can connect you with the box office manager for a group discount. As the many people who have seen the show so far could attest, it’s a blast and will provoke thought and perhaps a little outrage, and leave you with a whole array of new conversation-starters. I’ve also been running an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.com which includes a link to discount tickets if you participate. So ask me anything!

After eight previews over the past two weeks, Ingenious Nature is set to officially open its five-week off-Broadway run tonight. This means the critics have already been in to see the show, but none of them have had their say just yet, at least not in print. Over the next few days I’ll find out their verdict, which holds great sway over the future of the production, for better or for worse.

Our press shows were last weekend, and they were… mercurial. Saturday night’s show was the best by far, but for the week prior I literally re-wrote the end of the show on a nightly basis, staying up until the wee hours agonizing over the script, then (mostly) memorizing the new lines in the morning, emailing the revised pages to the team, and trying it on stage for a New York audience the same night. I have always romanticized the creative process as portrayed in the film Shakespeare in Love, with the company shouting “Will, where are my pages?!” and Shakespeare frantically scribbling and changing things and trying to keep up. It’s messy in theory and messy in practice, none of your poncy reflections-in-tranquility, but this is the first time I have experienced that degree of pressure and daily transformation first-hand. It’s thrilling and all-consuming and pretty much as awesome as it gets, from my perspective (although I know it was often exhausting for the rest of the team, dealing with the constant rewrites).

The show was untested until last week, though, and there were things that simply didn’t work when I came in to try them out in rehearsal. The challenge was to find an ending that gives a sense of closure when the story is about (a fictionalized version of) my love life (and Jamie’s, to a lesser degree), and that’s not exactly a story with a natural happy ending, just yet. Thanks to some awesome live-participation technology, the show is now a choose-your-own-adventure, with the audience deciding my fate on a nightly basis. Or maybe I decide my own fate and the audience just helps me rationalize that decision. I won’t give everything away, since I still hope many of you can come see it. And for those of you too far from New York, we will do an album version before too long.

To give you a feel for the show, here’s a great preview article from the online magazine Evolution: This View of Life, with an audio clip of the show’s audio peer-review team, including Steven Pinker, Sarah Hrdy, Martin Daly, Jonathan Haidt, and many others of note. Also, here’s a sweet blog review from Principle into Practice, the first critical response to appear in print. And yes, there will be more to come once the New York press have had their way with me.

INGENIOUS NATURE is a new off-Broadway show set to premiere on Friday at the Soho Playhouse. In the show I go on a series of dates with women I meet through OK Cupid (a dating website), while using evolutionary psychology as a roadmap to help understand the conflicts of interest and personality-clashes that ensue. Will I find a match worthy of parental investment? I date a creationist and explore the “behavioural immune system” theory of social conservatism, and a new-age yoga instructor teaches me about the seven chakras, which turn out to have a loose correlate in the psych lit as well. Putting theory into practice is wild ride when it comes to the science of mating.

Jamie Simmonds produced all the music for the show, and is also featured prominently in it as a character, performing virtuoso live turntablism to provide a distinctive sound and mood for each scene, as well as driving the storytelling ahead with comments and scratch quotes. Add a design team that includes Jason Boyd on lights (Q: “Can you make the theatre look like a Mobb Deep concert?” A: “Sure, I lit Mobb Deep’s last concert, so that shouldn’t be too hard”) and Erik Pearson (Canterbury Tales Remixed) on video projections, and you end up with something pretty spectacular.

Darren Lee Cole, the artistic director of the Soho Playhouse, is directing the production with aplomb, and keeping me in check. Here’s an e-blast Darren just sent out, which includes a couple of awesome (limited time only) discount ticket deals for the show. If you will be in NYC between now and January 6th, or if you have any friends here, please pass it on!

The Infomatic EP has arrived! Click here to stream or download it. This album began during our one-month songwriters-in-residency position at NIMBioS in Knoxville, Tennesee back in April/May of this year, and took shape over the course of the Summer. It features five tracks of auditory goodness produced by Mr. Simmonds, exploring allo-parenting, prosimians, oxytocin homologues, cladistics, population modelling, climate change, pseudo-science accommodationism, the homophobic paradox, and the applicability of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad references to science rap. Another key theme is the bizarre effects of this level of intellectual voraciousness on one’s love life, which can be complicated.

I’ve read a lot of evolutionary psychology over the past few years working on the Rap Guide to Evolution, and in this new play (which contains songs from The Rap Guide to Human Nature as well as a lot of new material) I explore the applicability of those theories to one basic challenge: finding your perfect match. Is such a thing even possible? And if it is, does a rich understanding of evolution help or hinder that quest? These and other questions will be boldly confronted on stage throughout Ingenious Nature, which I hope will be at least as entertaining as embarrassing. One alternative title I considered was: “Evolution: This Time It’s Personal.”

Finally, I’ve got some gigs coming up on the West Coast this week. If you know anyone in Victoria, we’ll be performing the full theatrical productions of both Canterbury Tales Remixed and Rap Guide to Evolution at UVic’s Farquhar Auditorium on Wednesday October 24th. Other up-coming tours include Saskatoon, SK in November, and then NH, MA, RI, and FL in February 2013. After that my schedule is pretty open, so if you want to set up a gig for 2013, holler at me!

I'm A African

What do hip hop and Darwin have in common? According to rapper Baba Brinkman, a lot. He’s the man behind The Rap Guide To Evolution, a musical project that finds natural selection in everything from the iPod shuffle, flashy jewelry to the act of rapping itself. Brinkman explains to host Bruce Gellerman why he, as a white Canadian, can proudly chant, “I’m A African.”

I met a few of the latter at the Murray family reunion I attended in Graff-Reinet, South Africa ten days ago. Through my mother’s side I’m a direct descendent of Andrew Murray, the Scottish Presbyterian minister who immigrated to South Africa as a missionary in 1822. Andrew Murray had sixteen children, of whom eleven survived and nine married. The boys all became ministers, and the girls all married ministers. The youngest of his sons, George, is my great great grandfather, and George’s sixteen children all had kids of their own. If evolution is all about genetic proliferation, Andrew Murray, with more than 4,000 living descendants in the family registry, was a high fitness individual.

On the first day of the family reunion there was a concert, in which many of the cousins performed, sang, danced, told funny stories in Afrikaans, and otherwise displayed their many Murray talents. I signed up to perform my infamous “Creationist Cousins” rap. I was aware that there would be a high proportion of evangelicals in the crowd and it would be a stark first impression (a lion released among zebras as my dad put it), but it seemed too perfect that this song, written years before about the young earth creationist cousins on my dad’s side of the family, could now find a new home among a whole new branch of as-yet-unmet cousins on my mom’s side (some of whom surely assumed it was written for them). To paraphrase Star Wars, the force of creationism is strong in my family.

If you haven’t heard the song or seen the video for Creationist Cousins yet, check it out:

The performance received polite applause from most, stony unimpressed stares from many, and wild applause from a few of the two-hundred or so Murray cousins in attendance. I was told later that there had been a behind-the-scenes debate among the event planners about whether to allow the Darwinian atheist Canadian cousin a place in the concert. The green light came from several of the more pluralistic thinkers in the family, who figured it would be a good idea to use my performance to open a family discussion about inclusiveness, specifically about whether the Murray clan’s “family’s values” were strictly biblical, or whether it was possible to find common ground among cousins of divergent opinion. I’m pretty sure my performance had the desired effect, if not shaking anyone’s faith then at least alerting the more cosseted minds among them to the bold fact that not everyone would sign on to the majority view that “Murray values are the values of Jesus.” Believe-or-burn doesn’t sit high on my list of moral precepts.

The rest of the weekend gave me the opportunity to reenact the discussions dramatized in the rap. One cousin suggested I read Darwin’s Black Box and extolled the virtues of “irreducible complexity” as a refutation of Darwin. Another solemnly informed me that recent scientific findings had confirmed creationism: a dinosaur fossil had been found with human remains in its stomach! Others told me there was zero evidence for evolution because there were “no transitional fossils.” And one of the more open-minded of them (a medical student) declared that she would happily accept any scientific finding, so long as it either confirms or doesn’t contradict the literal truth of every word of the bible. When I asked her if they taught Darwinian medicine in her coursework, she said yes, but luckily it has zero clinical applications so there was no need for her to believe any of it.

I weep for her future patients, but on the positive side I got an email yesterday from a prominent cancer researcher who uses evolutionary models to understand and improve treatment and prevention methods, and there might soon be a “Rap Guide to Darwinian Medicine” in the works. More to come on that, but back to my cousins.

Over the course of the weekend I spent hours discussing evolution and science and religion with my Afrikaner cousins, and frankly enjoyed the experience immensely. It was the most devoutly and overwhelmingly creationist group I had interacted with in years, and I lived in Tennessee for a month earlier this Spring. Now, as a strategy for communicating evolution, arguing directly with creationists may not be a winning formula. I understand why most scientists refuse public debates with them, since it gives the false impression that there’s any controversy about the truth of evolution in the science community. I’m also aware that not everyone has the appetite to debate tenaciously held metaphysical beliefs for a prolonged period, as I apparently do.

Public debates aside, I find discussing evolution with cousins and other family members is uniquely valuable, because the blood ties are a constant reminder never to let the discussion devolve into ad hominem attacks.  Instead of employing lazy but tempting responses ranging from “you’re stupid” to “you’re crazy,” the family ties keep me on the civil and respectful straight and narrow, instead framing things in terms of “from what I’ve read” or “from a scientific perspective” or “the evidence suggests,” etc. My cousins are intelligent people, and they are far from mentally ill, and yet they believe something that appears plainly ridiculous to someone with a modern scientific worldview. It’s a striking juxtaposition to behold up close.

In the end, these debates tend to reach a stalemate at divergent beliefs about absent but ultimately accessible evidence. When my cousin stated his belief that a dinosaur fossil was found with digested human remains inside it, proving his Flintstonian version of creationism, all I could say was: “I’m sorry, but there’s no chance that’s an authentic find.” One of the strongest fields of evidence in support of evolution is the consistency of the fossil record, which shows a continuous line of ancestral species in continuously older strata. It calls to mind J. B. S. Haldane’s famous quip about how “fossil rabbits in the precambrian” would effectively falsify evolution, or at least the current model of how it works. A dinosaur eating a human would presumably have the same effect, but creationist claims about the fossil record fail the test of evidence every time. Did I go look up his claim? Of course not. Did he go look up my claim that there were public museums where you could view dozens of “missing link” hominid fossils dating back millions of years, showing clear signs of gradual change from a more ape-like to a more human-like physiology? Probably not. And therein lies the stalemate.

So if the evidence overwhelmingly, invariably supports the evolutionary view and rejects the creationist one, the real challenge is to motivate creationists to go look at the evidence. It’s a harder task than it ought to be, partially because creationists are embedded in a god-centric worldview imposed on them by their parents since infancy, and more importantly because they are embedded in a social environment where acceptance of evolution would be grounds for ostracism. The respect and support of friends and peers is more important to almost everyone than the empirical truth. This is where communicating evolution becomes a propaganda war, a battle for hearts and minds, to see who can point their opponents more compellingly towards the evidence. The evidence doesn’t lie, but it is often ignored, and sometimes it’s willfully manipulated and made to seem to lie, although this latter tactic is always vulnerable to debunking.

Evolution communication needs a PR wing – not to substitute for evidence gathering and hard science, but to inspire the curiosity needed to investigate it – and the arts can help. I doubt if I converted any of my cousins to a scientific worldview, but I hope I made some of them curious to at least investigate my “here’s what scientists currently believe and here’s why” claims. That curiosity might lead to an honest reflection on some piece of physical evidence that doesn’t fit the biblical-literalism mould – the world is filled with such evidence at every turn – and that might in turn lead to an increased openness to investigate the richness of evolutionary science. In Lenhard Cohen’s words: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

The stint I did in Tennessee illustrates this communication challenge perfectly. Jamie (Mr. Simmonds) and I were the songwriters in residence at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, NIMBioS, in April and May, tasked with the challenge of communicating the intricacies of mathematical biology to the general public. Computational biology is complex work; it involves mathematical modelling and quantitative data analysis – number crunching – to make predictions about ecological and population-level change, comparing models with data from field observations. I think I understood the design of the equations when they were explained to me by NIMBioS faculty, but I was stuck for a long time on the problem of how to make this field entertaining enough to make popular rap songs about.

My first draft of a NIMBioS song was essentially a rant against creationism and pseudo-science, detailing the potentially life-saving work being done at NIMBioS, including infectious disease modelling and climate change modelling, and how inane it is to reject evolution and science in general given the potential it has to alleviate human misery. But ranting is ugly, so I scrapped that draft. I was moaning about this communication challenge to a friend in Vancouver shortly after our songwriter tenure was up, and he presented me with the obvious solution: “just make it all about sex!”

So here’s the next chapter in my attempt to communicate evolution, produced by Mr. Simmonds and featuring Chantel Upshaw on the chorus, a brand new name-your-price download: Mad Scientist (Talkin’ Nerdy).

It’s light on the technical details of computational biology, but heavy on many of the key themes and areas of research being conducted at NIMBioS, and my hope is that it will at least help to popularize and humanize the field, and spark some curiosity. It may be a bit risqué for my some of my cousins, but hey, what’s rap meant to be if not provocative? In Pump Up the Volume Christian Slater’s rallying cry was “Talk Hard,” but it’s 2012 – high time to inspire people to Talk Nerdy.

I am pleased to unveil my newest Rap Guide to Evolution music video, “Artificial Selection”, the final in a series of ten produced with support from the UK’s Wellcome Trust. You can view all ten of them on the official project website.

The Rap Guide to Evolution was my first attempt at science communication, after spending several years performing my rap version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The origins of the project came from a chance encounter, when a scientist named Dr. Mark Pallen at Birmingham University in the UK saw me perform my Canterbury Tales rap and asked if I could “do for Darwin what I did for Chaucer.” I took his challenge, but where to start? How do you turn Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection into a story, especially a story that relates to rap?

The idea behind “Artificial Selection” followed naturally from a single quote I randomly found in a rap song: “Too many MCs, not enough mics!” Pras from The Fugees very neatly sums up the intense competition that makes hip-hop such a challenging art form. Of course, when he says “not enough mics” Pras is not speaking literally. Microphones are pretty cheap to buy and in principle everyone who wants to rap can easily get one. In this case, however, “mics” are a symbolic representation of “crowds”. There are too many performers and not enough audiences to support them, and that’s what drives rap artists to practice their craft, their wordplay, their delivery, until they become exceptional, so that they can one day dominate the world’s mics (radio stations, concert stages, and record sales).

Unexpected Evolutionary Wisdom

Pras was complaining of the proliferation of low quality rappers in hip-hop (the next line is “Exit your show like I exit the turnpike”), but I wonder whether the best rappers would be as good as they are if not for the intense competition required to participate. Perhaps the Jay-Zs and Eminems and Lil Waynes of this world are the direct product of thousands of broken hip-hop dreams and crushed hopes. If so, we can call the failure of wack rappers tragic but necessary, to ensure the very high quality of those who prevail in the struggle for hip-hop survival. And that’s important, because they are the entertainers who touch the lives of millions.

Evolutionary Success Stories

Charles Darwin’s insight in The Origin of Species is based on a very similar observation. The “Doctrine of Malthus” that inspired his theory simply states that in every generation, “many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive” which leads to a “frequently recurring struggle for existence.” Darwin realized that the struggle itself is the creative force, the “war of nature” that produces all of the most beautiful structures and behaviours of the natural world, from the peacock’s tail to the giraffe’s neck to the human brain. Nature “selects” from among variations, choosing some individuals to reproduce and thrive, while dashing the hopes of others like so many failed rappers.

The Blueprint for Hip-hop?

When I first noticed this connection, I was far more familiar with the world of underground hip-hop than I was with the details of evolutionary theory. I had been writing songs and performing and generally struggling in the hip-hop underground for years with no other job (except the occasional few weeks tree-planting in the Summer). I had friends who used to rap and decided to quit, and I had other friends who seemed to be making a good living from rap, and I was never 100% sure which part of the evolutionary story I was playing.

This made for a great angle to approach the idea of natural (or artificial, human-directed) selection, because it made the story personal. Whether or not it’s a conscious choice, if you choose to listen to me rap, then you are playing an active role in (cultural) evolution, selecting my career for future success. If you choose to switch off or walk away when you hear me rap, then I am destined to go the way of the dodo, or Vanilla Ice. That’s evolution.

Evolutionary Dead End

This is a simple story, but a very easy one to understand as well. Parts of it are random, and parts of it are about choices and consequences. As I explored evolutionary theory further, I found many other interesting and unexpected points of overlap with hip-hop culture, and culture in general, and these became the songs in The Rap Guide to Evolution. I am very grateful to the Wellcome Trust for funding this project and helping us to bring them to life in video form. Enjoy!

I’ll cover the backlash first, and then the show. The first was a Twitter exchange I had with a student that went like this. Him: “If we aren’t allowed to pray in schools how can we invite atheists to come and speak” Me: “Because critical thinking is educational” Him: “nothing educational about cursing and flipping off high school students” Me: “unless it’s in a theatrical context, to make the point that cultural evolution is driven by imitation of words and gestures” Me again: “but I think you’re right, the point didn’t come across, just the offence. Hence, performance, feedback, revision” End transmission.

The next round came the day after the performance, when NIMBioS received several complaint emails from both the principal and the biology teacher. I wasn’t allowed to read the emails because of confidentiality clauses, but the gist of them came to me pretty clearly watercooler-gossip-style, since the incident was the talk of the institute (briefly). On a semi-related note, one of the researchers here is developing a mathematical model for predicting the spread and veracity of rumors. This one ought to be a candidate.

Obviously I can’t verify the exact wording, but the phrases I heard tossed around were “utterly disgraceful” “inappropriate” “obscene gestures” “insulting” “too much cursing” and “Christianity bashing”. The general message was that the content was not school-appropriate and it focussed too much on the religion and too little on the science, and I’m told they held a special assembly so the principle could address grievances and questions about the show. The director of NIMBioS had to issue an apology to the school (first time!) and the show I had scheduled at a different school the next day was abruptly cancelled. I guess the High School Principals in the area stay in touch.

* Correction: I recently learned that the second high school actually cancelledbefore the performance at Union County, citing concerns about the potential offence I would cause to believers in intelligent design after watching some of my YouTube videos.

Banned in the USA like 2 Live Crew! Not really; probably just banned from Knoxville-area High Schools. Speaking of 2 Live Crew, I was honestly surprised by the cursing and obscene gestures complaint. We started the show with the song “Natural Selection“, with its less-than-conciliatory “Creationism is dead wrong!” refrain, actually a hip-hop paraphrase of Darwin: “The view… that each species has been independently created, is erroneous.” Then we moved on to “Artificial Selection / Black-eyed Peas“, but it was half way through “I’m A African” that I was urgently signaled to stop. I told Jamie to cut the beat, thinking “that’s it, they’re pulling the plug” but instead I was handed a note that read “NO MORE CURSING!”

I was truly bewildered for a moment, because the off-Broadway version of the show is rich with (non-gratuitous) foul language, f-bombs galore, and I had cleaned it right up for the school show. Then it hit me, so I said to the kids: “I’ve been asked to stop swearing, and I assume they are referring to my use of the expressions ‘damn right’ and ‘hell yeah’ in the chorus of “I’m A African”, or possibly my use of the expression ‘pissed-off’ in the previous song. I’d like to apologize for my cultural ignorance, since these are simply not considered swear words in Canada, where I’m from. I was allowed to say them in school as a student and I’ve said them dozens of times in schools while performing this show in Canada and the UK and even other areas of America, but it’s my first time here, so I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone. Okay, on with the show… I’m a African!” I heard later that the teachers were furious at me for repeating the offensive words again. It just seemed like a teachable moment.

I was told later that the religious offence was caused not only by my choice of words but also by my choice of images in the keynote presentation. I showed the new video for “Darwin’s Acid” while performing the song, and also projected the classic jesus-with-a-dinosaur portrait face-to-face with a portrait of Darwin during the family dinner creationism/evolution debate in “Creationist Cousins“, as we do in the off-Broadway show. This was another moment of cultural insensitivity on my part, since I literally added those slides in the car that very morning, thinking it would increase the entertainment value of the scene. As per my tweet, in retrospect I think the theatrical context, ie a dramatization of actual debates with family members, was overwhelmed by the image projected six-feet-tall on stage behind me.

As for the “obscene gestures”, that’s a piece from the song “Artificial Selection / Black-eyed Peas” where I perform the show’s only (intentional) Eminem impression. The lyrics go:

Survival on stage is a non-random process
‘Cause those who get massive responses
Tend to influence those who aspire
To get massive responses
So if you say I sound like an Eminem rip-off
Then I’ll probably get pissed-off
And start flipping you off
And grabbing my crotch
And acting obnoxious
Screaming [in a nasal old-school Eminem voice]
“Naw dawg, that’s proposterous!”

Here’s the same bit in a recent Wired Magazine feature:

I complete the impression by momentarily grabbing my crotch and giving the crowd the finger in the style of Em’s “My Name Is” video (among others), part satire, part tribute, part serious point about how memes spread via mimicry. In this school, however, giving students the finger and crotch-grabbing were not welcome, and at least one student was more offended than educated. Then, in an uncanny coincidence, I accidentally slammed the offending finger in a minivan door the following day and my fingernail turned black. My crotch, at the time of this writing, is fine.

At the end of the show we had a productive and entertaining question period which included such gems as “What if the world blows up and Jesus comes back and there’s no more evolution?” and “Wait, are you saying we should have sex, or we shouldn’t have sex?” and afterwards the students who were interviewed by NIMBioS staff said the show was interesting, entertaining, made them think about the science, etc. Some of them said they disagreed with me and believed the religion version and not the evolution version, but none of them seemed too put-off by the experience. NIMBioS is working on a video with those student interviews, but in the meantime if you’re curious about my very judicious answers to those priceless questions, you can watch it unfold here:

Then, two days after this performance in which I confess I did blaspheme and mock religion mercilessly, I was stricken by a plague, tonsillitis actually, and spent three days in bed with a 104 degree fever and horrible sore throat, shivering and contemplating the origins of both the religious and the rational interpretations of chance events, especially ones that look uncannily like some kind of comeuppance.

Anyway, I’m fine now thanks to science-based medicine, penicillin having kicked the bacteria’s ciliated ass, and tonight is the big show here at the University of Tennessee, which means the drama is still unfolding. We’ll see if the college crowd responds better than the high school one.

* Update: The (uncensored) on-campus show got a redemptive unanimous standing ovation.

So is there any revision called for? In the future I’ll consult more closely with teachers to make sure expressions like “damn” and “hell” aren’t deal breakers. They spice up the show but are certainly not essential to the experience, and maybe I could have reached more students by toning it down (although I’m skeptical, more likely the toned-down version would reach fewer students while placating more teachers).

As for the unequivocal “creationism is dead wrong” message, that most definitely IS crucial to the show and I’m happy to defend it to anyone. Hence, caveat emptor, but this is definitely not my last high school appearance.

The Canterbury Tales Remixed premiered off-Broadway in November 2011 and ran for eleven weeks, and now the album version is finally complete! If you think you’ve heard my rap interpretations of the classics before, believe me you’ve never heard it like this. Click here to start the record streaming before you keep reading.

Produced by UK Millennium Award winner Mr. Simmonds, the album features brand new Tales, including a beast fable adapted from Aesop via the Nun’s Priest, as well as complete rewrites of the Wife of Bath’s and Pardoner’s Tales and re-scored and re-mixed versions of the Merchant’s Tale and the epic stories of Beowulf and Gilgamesh. Set to an orchestral soundtrack of classic boom-bap hip-hop beats mixed with soulful live instruments, this record is the bastard offspring of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Slick Rick’s The Art of Storytelling.

The album can be downloaded now from iTunes, or with the lyrics encoded in the song files for smartphone viewing from Bandcamp name-your-price style.

As summarized in a glowing review from Show Business Weekly:
“The stories do, indeed, have much in common with the ones found in contemporary pop culture: warriors clash, badass thieves and thugs receive a brutal comeuppance, husbands fight a losing battle against wily wives and seducing lotharios, villages are plagued by sinister forces of nature… like ancient listeners gathered around the fire, we want to hear more.”

Please forward, tweet, post, and otherwise share with the world!

Useful or Just Pretty?

David recently published an article in the New Statesman, and sent me a link to it, and I found much to disagree with, so I wrote him a response. Here’s the original article, entitled, “Survival of the Prettiest” and here’s my response:

David,

The way you describe sexual selection in this article is either confused or designed to confuse, and is blatantly unfair to the scientists who work in the field. The main problem is your juxtaposition of the old dogmatic Dawkins-and-his-cronies view of evolution vs the new, open-minded, aesthetically sensitive view of evolution, but the difference between these two groups is either illusory or else it’s the difference between good science and wishful thinking.

Supposedly the former group “unquestioningly” sees evolution as promoting only that which is “merely useful” and “practical” and “good for spreading genes” while the latter group sees evolution as creating beautiful and complex structures “simply because it can.” This borders dangerously on intelligent design. Your slight of hand is in the juxtaposition between “useful” vs “beautiful”, which in the neo-Darwinian view isn’t a conflict at all. Beautiful is useful. Sexually selected traits are useful and practical for the purpose of attracting mates and spreading genes, while naturally selected traits are useful and practical for getting food, avoiding predators, resisting parasites, and not dying, also for the purpose of being ready and able to attract mates and spread genes. All good scientists, including Dawkins, acknowledge and celebrate this well-established fact, and none of them, as far as I know, see this simple explanatory framework as incompatible with an appreciation of the majesty and beauty of the natural world.

But you seem to disagree. You incorrectly criticize textbooks for suggesting “sexually selected beauty is ultimately practical, in that it is all for the good of propagating the species.” No textbook has used that awkward “for the good of propagating the species” phrase for decades as far as I know. It’s for propagating the genes of the individual in competition with other differently-endowed individuals that such traits evolve. You criticize the handicap principle and costly signalling theory as something that “supposedly” explains complex ornaments, such that the bower is “supposed to be a kind of ‘honest signal’, an artistic sign demonstrating that its maker has the best genes in the entire population.” If you don’t think that’s what the bower is for, then what else? The fact that the exact details of the end result are “not inevitable” doesn’t invalidate the explanation. It just makes certain aspects of the design by-products or “spandrels” of the adaptive process, like the pattern of creases in your navel, which you may or may not find beautiful.

This seems to be the crux of your criticism: “Any unified theory of evolution has to be able to appreciate beauty, without explaining it in such a way that its allure is lost.” My impression, however, is that you are unsatisfied with genetic and adaptive explanations of beauty in principle, regardless of their scientific validity. If that is true, then the only way to maintain the allure would be to not explain it, and that’s where I think you are in danger of being not just unscientific but anti-scientific. If “fundamentalist Darwinians” miss the “unalloyed beauty” that you supposedly savour, merely because they are interested in explaining the origins of that beauty, then there is an easy way to avoid alloying your sense of beauty: ignore the explanation. I don’t see you presenting an alternative explanation, I only see you rejecting a straw-man version of the standard explanation, and the result will inevitably confuse people about how natural selection (with sexual selection as a special sub-category) operates, that is, strictly as changes in gene-frequency within breeding populations.

I also find it annoying the way so many writers lay out their articles like this: 1) say that Dawkins is narrow-minded 2) mis-represent his views 3) describe the writer’s own open-minded views, which in fact are either correct and Dawkins would agree with them, or are incorrect 4) wish scientists would be more open-minded like self and less like mean ol’ Dawkins. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don’t agree with Dawkins on everything. For instance, I think he’s probably wrong to reject multi-level selection theory (the new version of group selection), but in his treatment of sexual selection I can’t fault him.

The essential question to ask each time you are formulating a criticism of Dawkins is this: Is he wrong, or just mean? The two are not the same, and disagreeing with someone’s rhetorical choices is not the same as disagreeing with the substance of their argument. It’s the substance of orthodox Darwinian sexual selection theory that you need to challenge if you don’t think it’s correct, and successfully doing so would probably net you a Nobel prize in science. The more well-established a theory, the more impressed everyone is when someone overturns it. I wish you every success, but in the meantime, I’m sticking with the scientists.

Yours in seeking truth, aesthetically and otherwise,

Baba

Last weekend Mr. Simmonds and I traveled to Fort Bragg, NC for Rock Beyond Belief, the historical first on-base rock concert for military non-believers. The day got off to a late start due to a morning downpour, which was gloated over by the spiteful devout but only until about 1pm, and after that the clouds blew over and we had beautiful sunshine all day, although we had the good sense not to take it personally. The turn-out was estimated at around 1500 by one of the organizers I spoke to, and the day was one of highly-rational family fun. Here’s a news report on the local TV Channel 14 that makes ample use of our performance.

 Once the rain stopped and after a brief soundcheck Jamie and I rocked a set of Darwinian rap songs, followed by a speech from headliner Richard Dawkins. I had met Dawkins a few times before but until Rock Beyond Belief he had never been exposed to the Rap Guide to Evolution experience. He told me with typical exuberance that he “enjoyed the performance.” The Associated Press reported positively on the concert, and their article – which quotes me as eloquently shouting: “We got any Darwin fans in the house?!?” – was syndicated far and wide. Here it is at military.com, complete with endless comments expressing outrage that atheists woulddare to unapologetically make our existence known and even seem to enjoy the experience.

Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

One of the soldiers I met at Rock Beyond Belief is an ex-Navyman, a gay atheist who was discharged for coming out (as gay, not as an atheist) under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell a few years ago. His job after leaving the Navy was as an administrative assistant to Christopher Hitchens, and back in 2011 he (the assistant, not Hitchens) wrote me an email to say that he had played the song Darwin’s Acid for Hitch during his illness and it elicited this response from the great man: “More! More!” That was one of my favourite bits of feedback I’ve ever had, but even better was when he wrote again to tell me that “Christopher is ‘planning’ to promote you in a piece he’s writing” on the subject of “popularizing science and free-thought.” The imagination of this humble rapper was boggled.

Alas, the world lost a lucid voice for reason in December, 2011, when Christopher Hitchens passed away, depriving us of all the future books he might have written and the future debates he inevitably would have won with flair, not to mention the planned article promoting yours truly. I regret that I never got to meet Hitchens, but his writing has emboldened me to speak my mind even – or especially – when the ranks of the dogmatic and their defenders are sure to take offence. Given the fact that some of us are offended by timidness and banality, it is logically impossible to completely avoid offending anyone. The best we can do is choose to offend people for the right reasons.

New Darwin’s Acid Video

So the newest Rap Guide to Evolution music video, Darwin’s Acid, is dedicated to Hitch’s memory. The video was illustrated by Silvie Van Schie and Animated by Joep Veldhuis, a very talented visual design team from the Netherlands, and it captures the awesome majesty and depth, and yes, even the inspirational quality and deep solace offered by the Darwinian worldview, in which each of us is the inheritor of evolution’s billions-of-years-old legacy, and in which we are the conscious and collaborative architects of many aspects of its future. Inspired by Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the song presents a 100% naturalistic vision with no place for gods or fairies, angels or demons, and yet it is about as far from hopeless and nihilistic as any philosophy or religion you might choose to probe, with the added bonus of being supported by all of the known evidence. Click here to watch the ”Darwin’s Acid” Music Video.

Next Stop: NIMBioS

Next week I depart for Knoxville, TN, where I will spend four weeks as a guest of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, as a songwriter-in-residence. The challenge, now that I’ve chosen to accept it, is to visit with and learn from the researchers and PhDs there and write a collection of songs to popularize their work. My algebra is a bit rusty, admittedly, but I’m there as a lyricist not as a mathematician, so I’m sure they’ll help me to brush up. If any of you are based in the deep South and want to set up a local gig while I’m in the ‘hood (roughly April 11 – May 6), just message me to let me know.

Unfortunately, the Times decided to pass on it, for the stated reason that: “Raps are best heard, not read. I worry that this is going to seem flat on the page.” Ouch. I wrote back making the case for rap as a textual as well as an aural medium, arguing that there was nothing you could say about rap in that regard that isn’t also true of all poetry from Shakespeare to Edgar Allen Poe. Not to gratuitously compare myself to the greats, but Shakespeare is also meant to be performed, and there is still something to be gained from reading it, surely.

My hunch, however, is that the content of my rap put them off at least as much as any sense that the genre itself isn’t fit to print. I might be wrong, and slights against homeopathy and scientology and James Frey as memoirist and other absurdities may have played no role in their decision, but from this vantage I can only speculate. One might as well question the will of the gods as the whims of editors.

They did invite me to submit the recorded song to be hosted on nytimes.com as part of their reading theme, but that will be at the discretion of yet another editor. Hence, rather than allow this fine work to die in the inbox of the New York Times, I’m going to do what I usually do and just put it out myself.

Presenting “Get It From Reading,” including hyperlinks to learn more about each of the books, and a brand new free Mp3 download produced by Mr. Simmonds.

Get It From Reading

My reading habits resemble the neediness of speed addicts
Like James Frey in A Million Little Pieces, fiending for chapters
But unlike Frey, in my case it really happens
I won’t exaggerate just to get a seedy reaction
I can’t sleep ‘til I’ve had it – starin’ in bed at the ceilin’
I need a perspective shift, and I think I’m hooked on the feelin’
I rarely get it from fiction; I find information appealin’
So my Top Ten begins with Ed Wilson, Consilience
And now the unification of knowledge is my policy
Jared Diamond taught me history via biogeography
Guns, Germs, and Steel – that’s a Pulitzer Prize
Scientology? Homeopathy? That’s pseudo-science
You can find evidence-based medicine at BadScience.net
The more you read, the less you believe the flying saucer set
And thanks to non-fiction I can tell you why I’m godless
Besides my intuition that all religion is nonsense
Logical arguments for god’s existence get debunked
One by one when Dawkins brings out the heavy guns
But if you wanna know where The God Delusion comes from
Read David Sloan Wilson, Evolution For Everyone

Some people get it from eating
And other people get it from breeding
Well I can get a thrill from these things
But I can even get it from reading
From reading? From reading
I can even get it from reading
‘Cause I need it
I need it so bad

These are the reads that make my whole perspective swell
I still remember when I discovered Heath and Potter’s The Rebel Sell
I bought a dozen copies for my friends, like: “Frickin’ hell!
It’s non-conformity that makes economies jet-propel!”
That’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you’re a rebel
As far as I can tell, though, the evidence is clearly settled
Just like the social cost of opulence that’s near a ghetto
Inequality is bad for us all, read The Spirit Level
And when I search for meaning, I’m not much of a meditator
I’d rather read Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Live inside certain books, and provide an escalator
To climb The Moral Landscape, and be a suffering mitigator
And that’s my pathway, I collect facts in prose
And spin them into rhyme flows, and spit raps at shows
And recently I cracked Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow
And I felt my System 2 catapult – that’s the dope!
Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t hate fiction
I try to find space in my day for escapism
But these are the books that rearranged my brain rhythms
And if you can change those, the world can change with ‘em

Works Cited:

1. Dawkins, Richard: The God Delusion
2. Diamond, Jared: Guns, Germs and Steel
3. Goldacre, Ben: Bad Science
4. Harris, Sam: The Moral Landscape
5. Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter: The Rebel Sell
6. Kahneman, Daniel: Thinking, Fast and Slow
7. Pickett, Kate and Richard Wilkinson: The Spirit Level
8. Pinker, Steven: The Better Angels of Our Nature
9. Wilson, Edward O: Consilience
10. Wilson, David Sloan: Evolution For Everyone

Okay, so I’m a bit late. Darwin Day was last Sunday, which found me and Mr. Simmonds and the rest of the off-Broadway team in Iowa City on the first stop of our Evolution 2012 tour. We performed The Rap Guide to Evolution to a packed house and got a rousing response, and even went bar-hopping the night before the show with a group of rowdy PhDs and a full-sized cardboard cut-out of Darwin in tow. At one point the esteemed naturalist was drawn into a burlesque mating dance. Here’s review article about the show from the local paper, the Iowa Press Citizen.

 The Iowa review zeros in on the section of the show that many people find the most surreal and memorable, the part where I remix the classic Black Nationalist anthem “I’m A African” by Dead Prez (from their album Let’s Get Free), flipping it as a celebration of the unity of common descent of all humans and our recent common roots in Africa. From the perspective of evolution, Afro-centricity belongs to the whole human race, and in honour of Darwin Day 2012 I am proud to unveil the new music video for I’m A African, animated by the amazing Tommy Nagle and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust (with the help of some lovely Crowdfunders).

To create the video I solicited video clips and still images from my mailing list (sign up to the left), and you came through beautifully, with dozens of people representing ethnic groups from every continent and every background, all singing along: “I’m A African! And I know what’s happenin!” We even got the world-famous human evolution expert and originator of the “Out of Africa” theory of human origins Chris Stringer in on the act, and gave him a special clip at the end. What I didn’t do a good job of though, is keeping track of who’s who, so if you are in the video and you want to be credited in the “Contributors” section of the website, just put your name in a comment or write me an email requesting inclusion.

And what’s next? The Canterbury Tales Remixed will be playing Teatro Jaco in Costa Rica in early March, so in two weeks I’m hitting the beach for my first-ever public theatre run in Central America. But first, the Wonder Cabinet is at NYU on February 25th, free and open to the public!

If you want to know what else I’ve been up to here’s a recent interview with some poetic waxing.

Calling all New Yorkers! Come see the show before it closes! Here’s a link to tickets, and to the New York Times Theatre Page, where we are STILL in the Critics’ Picks.

So what’s next? Jamie (Mr. Simmonds) and I are moving to Astoria, Queens, next week, where we’ll set up the recording studio and finally finish the album we’ve been working on for the past few months. I know I said it would be finished in December but I underestimated a few things, including our ability to set aside the time with our weekly gig schedule AND the tolerance of our neighbours here in Soho for loud beats being mixed and mastered. Several warnings from “the super” later, we’re relocating for the final push.

And then we go on tour. The Rap Guide to Evolution is touring in 2012 and beyond, and the first gig is coming up in a few weeks: Iowa City for Darwin Day. Tell all your Iowa people! Or, if you don’t have any Iowa people, check out rapguidetoevolution.com for upcoming tour gigs. Here’s the new youtube trailer for the Rap Guide to Evolution, now available for bookings.

In other music news, here’s the first single from an upcoming UK Hip-hop album I’ll be featured on called the Menagerie, from Tom Caruana’s Tea Sea Records label. Check out the video for Keep Your Heads Down, with my Brighton hip-hop fam Dizraeli and Teej. The full Menagerie album is coming soon so stay tuned!

And last but not least, here’s a nice arts feature from the Victoria Times Columnist, the local paper where I went to grad school, which gives a decent overview of everything I’ve been up to lately.

If any of you have written me emails in the past few months with no response, you’re not alone! Performing off-Broadway has wreaked havoc with my correspondence, but rest assured I will get back to you, just as soon as the show closes and I’ve slept for a week.

The key question he kept coming back to is: what psychological traits are beneficial or even necessary for a person to succeed as a rapper? Good question! It’s the only interview I’ve ever done where I learned surprising things about myself along the way, and the full episode is now live on Scott’s Psychology Today blog.

And what did Dr. Scott reveal about me? Extroversion is a composite of two underlying traits, and I scored very differently on them. I’m high in Assertiveness (75%) but not so high in Enthusiasm (55%) which helps to explain why I’m so much more ebullient and larger-than-life on stage than off.

I had a high self-reported level of social awareness (83.3%) which turns out to be delusional in many people (just like we all think we’re better-than-average drivers) but I scored high in the objective “reading the mind in the eyes” test, which means my self-awareness of my social-awareness is actually pretty accurate. And I was off-the-charts (91.56%) in stress management and emotional intelligence (for instance, see my previous post about writing and mounting a new off-Broadway show in a matter of weeks).

I scored high in “Blirtatiousness” or the quality of speaking-your-mind, which is surely a beneficial trait for a rapper to have, and I also got high marks for socio-sexuality and “self-reported mating intelligence” which is almost certainly a hip-hop pre-requisite. But before you go beating me with the “typical promiscuous rapper” stick, I also got high marks for “Ability to Sustain Relationships” (clearly a latent ability) and apparently the most important quality I look for in a relationship partner is self-knowledge, to a fault. That last one was (ironically) news to me.

And what about narcissism? Surely narcissism is the personality trait that rappers get criticized for more than anything else: braggadocio, swagger, arrogance. Shouts out to Kanye! Can you survive as a rapper without getting high off your own supply of narcissism? Can you remain a person of substance if you succumb to its seductive pull? Thankfully, narcissism is like extroversion in that it’s divisible into underlying traits, and I kicked ass on the good ones while avoiding the bad ones. YES! The composite traits for narcissism are Exhibitionism, Exploitativeness, Entitlement, and Superiority, and apparently I’m very high in Exhibitionism (nothing but necessary for an entertainer) and Superiority (aka competitiveness) but very low in the far uglier qualities of Exploitativeness and Entitlement. Whew!

I felt like Harry Potter sweating under the Sorting Hat whispering “Please not Slytherin, Please not Slytherin!” and Dr. Scott’s was the triumphant voice that shouted “Gryffindor!”

The backstory on how this show came together is also interesting, so I’ll take a moment to regale you. The Rap Guide to Evolution closed on November 6th, after 123 off-Broadway performances (we started in mid-June). Rap Guide played to 6,824 people during its New York run, and there’s more to come when we tour in 2012.*

Another nice result of the Rap Guide run was a recent feature in the December edition of WIRED magazine, including a swanky video clip. The Canterbury Tales Remixed had its first preview on November 23rd, so we had just over two weeks to get the show up and running, which was a piece of cake since it was all pre-written anyway. Or so I thought.

Many of you will have seen my original one-man show The Rap Canterbury Tales, which I performed hundreds of times between 2003 and 2008, but which had been semi-retired for a while since I was focussing on evolution and science rap. Well, I committed to the off-Broadway run (with its ridiculously short turn-around time) thinking I could stitch together the best parts from Rap Canterbury Tales and my other storytelling show, Rapconteur, but when I went back to the original Chaucer/Rap adaptations I wrote in 2003 and 2004, the style felt stale to me somehow, so I scrapped them and started fresh.

The upshot is that The Canterbury Tales Remixed contains zero percent recycled content from The Rap Canterbury Tales. It’s still me rapping medieval stories, but the music is new (thanks to Jamie Simmonds’ excellence), the framing content is new, and 60% of the script was written in the past month. The only previously-aired sections are the stories I wrote last year for Rapconteur, including Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Merchant’s Tale. The Pardoner’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale I rewrote entirely from scratch for this production, and the new versions are… sparkling, especially with the visual projection design by Erik Pearson and the new directing by Soho Playhouse capo Darren Lee Cole.

We are now settling into the groove of once-again performing six shows per week, having been given a new lease on our off-Broadway life, and I’m feeling good about it, if a bit fried. We’re scheduled to run until January 8th, but if the show is popular this could once again be open-ended. Here are two other positive reviews, one from Backstage.com, and today’s review from Theatre Is Easy.

Please tell your friends in New York to come see us! Here’s the link to buy tickets.

Oh yeah, and The Canterbury Tales Remixed will be available soon as an album as well, featuring all of Mr. Simmonds’ amazing new music. It’s in the editing/mixing/mastering phase right now, so realistically we’re looking at a release date of roughly December 20 (hopefully!). This record was supposed to be finished weeks ago, but then I re-wrote those two Tales, and then we decided to bring in live cello, violin, flute, and add a Prologue, Epilogue, etc, all of which is making it an amazing record, and causing delays.

Can’t wait to share the final result!
*By the way, some people got an email from me saying the audience for Rap Guide was over 10,000 after 145 shows, but that was me quoting a box office error that included cancelled shows. 6,824 people in 123 shows, I’m assured, is the correct total.

We now have only one week left of the Rap Guide to Evolution off-Broadway, after nearly five months of performing the show six nights per week, what a run! Crowds still love it, I’m still having a blast, and soon it will be time to take Darwin on the road. The Evolution 2012 Tour will commence in February, but first, The Canterbury Tales Remixed starts its seven-week run at the Soho Playhouse on November 23rd, which means we’re about to kick into high gear once again, bringing together a theatre team, writing, directing, designing, and scoring music for a whole new show. Check out the trailer:

Tickets for The Canterbury Tales Remixed are now available for advanced purchase on the Soho Playhouse website.

In honour of the final week of this incredible performing marathon, here’s my new music video for the song Worst Comes to Worst, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. We threw a beach party on the Galapagos Islands (with the help of some green screen magic) to explore the evolutionary origins of fear, violence, trust, and compassion, featuring Mr. Simmonds, Dizraeli, and an alien DJ party-crasher. Come party with the iguanas!

Finally, I have another friend in need of your support. David Sloan Wilson recently sent me this link to a new evolutionary initiative founded by one of his grad students, Robert Kadar. Evolution: This View of Life is “the first online magazine designed to communicate modern evolutionary science content to the general public” and that can only be a good thing! I just pledged $50 on Kickstarter to get this important project off the ground. Click here to help support Evolution: This View of Life!

First, I have good friends in need of your help. Aaron Nazrul and the Boom Booms are an amazing Vancouver-based band I helped to launch, and their music is released on my record label. They are short-listed in a competition that could award them $100,000 of professional development money to make a new album and music video and organize a tour to Brazil, but to win they need your online vote! You can learn more here, or vote directly here. The Boom Booms have helped me with lots of my hip-hop tracks (here’s my favourite one), so if you appreciate my music please help them in return!

Second, the Rap Guide to Business is now officially released, with a swanky digital booklet and everything. You can get it from Bandcamp and iTunes and other digital stores, and soon every single MBA student at the NYU Stern School of Business will have a physical copy in their hands to help them become shrewd *and* conscientious entrepreneurs. With the Occupy Wall Street movement recently taking over New York City, the album’s anti-malfeasance track “Vacuums” seems especially timely.

Third, I can announce an exciting new development in my off-Broadway saga here in New York. The Soho Playhouse has optioned a six-week run of a new show called “The Canterbury Tales Remixed”, which will combine some new writing with the best material from my previous two rap/literature shows, The Rap Canterbury Tales and Rapconteur. Previews of the new show will commence on November 23rd, with the official  opening on December 1st. Check the Soho Playhouse website for more updates, and if you’re in NYC this winter come see me performing Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and The Canterbury Tales!

Finally, we are entering the last four weeks of shows for The Rap Guide to Evolution, which will continue at the Soho Playhouse only until November 6th. If you were planning to catch it, or know someone who was, now is the time to act! The New York Times called the Rap Guide “Astonishing and brilliant” and the response so far has been amazing, especially since the show is a pro-science polemic and passionate tribute to Charles Darwin and his contributions to human knowledge and self-determination. For a show that nerdy to also succeed in a public theatre run is a testament to the rise of wise. As 50 Cent recently said on Twitter: “Smart is the new Gangsta”!

During the crowdfunder drive we had hoped/intended that all twelve videos would be finished and ready to distribute on DVD by now, but the intricacies of coordinating a talented and underpaid team of in-demand video editors, animators, researchers, science consultants, and administrators has slowed our progress down considerably. Still, the end is in sight! Since most of the videos are mostly done and require only small fixes or tweaks, my best call at this point is that all twelve videos will be completed by the end of the year and we’ll have the educational DVDs ready for schools and funders by January. In the meantime, we’ll keep releasing the videos on the website as they are finalized, one every few weeks until the collection is complete.

The newest addition, DNA, features amazing James Bond-inspired animation from Tommy Nagle, with sultry belly dancers Sadiyya Vahed & Emmanuelle Julien illustrating the undulations of the DNA double helix, and gorgeous vocals from Noa Bodner. Science has never looked or sounded so sexy… you know, for the kids. Enjoy!

The only time I have seen bonobos up close was at the San Diego zoo when I was in town for the Darwin Symposium in 2009. I watched a group of bonobos chase each other around and frolic and play, but also witnessed something striking. One female left the group and sequestered herself in a little enclave in the rock, and proceeded to stick her fingers down her throat, inducing vomiting. She puked up a pile of whatever into her hand, smelled it, examined it, and gobbled it down again, licking her fingers. A few minutes later, she stuck her fingers down her throat again, threw up again, and ate it again. I watched her induce vomiting three times, eat it three times, and then hop out of the enclave and go rejoin the group, with just as much in her stomach, give or take, as when she started.

I asked Isabel if she had ever seen anything like this “Bonobo Bulimia” phenomenon in the wild and she said no, and neither has she ever heard of anyone observing it, but there is one published paper that seems to outline a similar observation of a captive bonobo at the Frankfurt zoo.

I wonder, since the behavior I saw in San Diego included both inducing vomiting and eating it again, whether this is really analogous to an eating disorder like bulimia. It could instead fall under the category of exploratory play behavior, which might result from an individual simply discovering a button or trigger by which you can induce a surprising response from the body, and then playing with it to discover its parameters.

Of course masturbation is the example that springs most easily to mind, and the one we are all familiar with, as are bonobos. But there are others. I still remember when I first discovered as a kid that I could take a square of toilet paper, grab it at the corners, and twist it into a thin rigid stick. Inserting this slowly into a nostril as far as it will comfortably go and slowly turning it while inhaling through your nose will reliably cause you to sneeze, again and again and again, as many times as you like. If you enjoy the feeling of a sneeze, beware abusing this power (though it is a good way to wake yourself up if you need to work and start feeling horribly drowsy).

Likewise, I remember when I first learned, around the age of 8, that I could choose to throw up any time I wanted just by tickling my uvula. Several times throughout my youth when I felt like I had eaten something that was making me feel ill, I would simply go to the washroom, hug the toilet, give myself a tickle and get rid of it. I haven’t done this for a while simply because one learns over the course of a lifetime what kind of eating habits sit right and what kinds don’t, but I still remember how it felt to discover both of those triggers. It felt like a form of empowerment, of acquiring control over reflexes. Maybe that’s what the bonobo I saw was doing.

The CD launch, by the way, was for Afropolitan by Derrick Ashong (aka DNA) and Soulfége. We heard tracks from Afropolitan and a passionate articulation of its guiding philosophy by Derrick, who is a definitely a kindred spirit, a genre-pushing intellectual MC, my favorite kind. Speaking of genre-pushing intellectual hip-hop heads, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky was also there, cool party.

Check out the record…

The first was my home website, www.BabaBrinkman.com, which now cleverly features streaming audio, video, twitter feeds, a blog, theatre productions, and educational projects.

Noel also designed the website for Lit Fuse Records, www.LitFuseRecords.com, where you can stream and download my own music as well as albums from the Boom Booms, Aaron Nazrul, Mud Sun, Smoky Tiger, and Lit Fuse in-house producer Mr. Simmonds.

Noel also designed the educational website for the Wellcome Trust-sponsored Rap Guide to Evolution Music Videos, www.RapGuidetoEvolution.co.uk, and the website for the currently-running off-Broadway production of the show, www.RapGuidetoEvolution.com.

Finally, she designed the album artwork and new website for Lit Fuse Records artists The Boom Booms, who are currently storming the Western Canadian Music Festival ramparts, leaving a trail of goofy grins in their wake. Check them out at www.TheBoomBooms.ca and get their new album Hot Rum!

Noel works with a web programmer and search engine optimization expert to create the sites, and both of them have been a pleasure to collaborate with. Get at them if you have any web design needs.

For showtimes and tickets click here, and if you have friends in NYC, please share!

On the buzz front, we recently got promoted by Talib Kweli’s Blacksmith label, and Kweli himself gave the show a boost on Twitter, plus here’s an absolutely cracking review that just appeared on TotalTheatre.com and a nice interview with the European music magazine Electronic Beats.

The only really bad review we’ve had so far is from a crackpot promoter of cancer quackery (she actually uses the Disney cartoon Happy Feet as a scientific reference in her review) which in a way is reassuring.

Speaking of music, I’m writing this email from the Manhattan apartment I share with Jamie aka Mr. Simmonds, which also doubles as a recording studio. Jamie’s currently working on some sublime new beats for our next project, The Rap Guide to Business, due for release at the end of August. If you haven’t downloaded The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised yet, you can now get it from iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon (mail order) and most other digital stores.

Also in music news, Lit Fuse Records’ favorite latin soul singer Aaron Nazrul is now touring BC with his band The Boom Booms, and they’ve just completed an absolutely beautiful new record as well. You can now download Hot Rum! from the Lit Fuse Records Bandcamp site. Go on, give it a listen.

On the education front, we have a new music video now live on the Wellcome Trust sponsored teaching site www.RapGuidetoEvolution.co.uk. Check out the awesome video for Natural Selection, featuring a breakdancing Charles Darwin battling Sarah Palin, Michel Foucault, and “God” for supremacy on the intellectual dance floor. It took some make-up and costume magic to transform a London breakdance crew into our cast of characters, but the result is hilarious and sure to stir up some semi-serious discussion.

Finally, here’s a talk I did at TEDxEast in May, featuring the debut performances of Used To Be The Man and Don’t Sleep With Mean People.

‘Til next time, keep your happy feet moving on the dancefloor of ideas…

Idea 1: the clitoris evolved as a mate-selection organ.

This is Geoffrey Miller’s “choosy clitoris” theory from The Mating Mind: “The choosy clitoris should produce orgasm only when the woman feels genuinely attracted to a man’s body, mind, and personality, and when the man proves his attentiveness and fitness through the right stimulation.” (p 239)

Some evolutionary theorists think the female orgasm in humans is a developmental by-product, like male nipples, but I tend to agree with Miller. If you want to learn more about this debate, here’s an adaptationist account by David Barash, in response to a by-product argument.

Idea 2: there is no one-size-fits-all solution

If the clitoris evolved as an organ of discrimination or choosiness, then one of the things it ought to discriminate against is inattentiveness or disinterest. This follows from costly signaling logic and parental investment theory, and may help to explain the notorious variation in female sexual response. Some women never have orgasms, some rarely have them, some can only give them to themselves, some can only get them from intercourse with clitoral stimulation, some can have multiple orgasms during sex with no manual assistance, etc. There is some evidence this variation is partially genetic, which suggests evolution is maintaining it as a polymorphism.

Idea 3: male and female sexuality is locked in an arms race

Actually it’s more like a code-breaking and code-making race, with female sexuality growing more complicated, labyrinthine, and cryptic in order to exact the only costly signal of a man’s intentions that can be trusted: lots of time, patience, attention, etc, like a Rubik’s Cube with more and more sections.

Idea 4: female sexuality is also cryptic to women

If the clitoris is an organ of discrimination, like a gate-keeper, then it would be even more effective if women weren’t able to give away their own passkey, so to speak. This is partially based on Robert Trivers’ concept of the “Evolution of Self-Deception,” and partially based on some research that shows how female sexual response is vastly more complex than male sexual response, often with virtually no correlation between physiological response and conscious awareness. This New York Times article summarizes the research nicely: “Mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.”

Idea 5: superstition and religiosity are partially a response to environmental randomness

This is a well-documented effect in psychology. The less your actions achieve their desired outcome, the more likely you are to associate the outcome with uncorrelated actions, including supernatural forces. If fishermen find the fish where they look for them, they tend to say it was their skill that brought in the catch. If they don’t find the fish where they look for them, they tend to say the gods were against them. Risk management or “error management theory” suggests we are more prone to false positives than false negatives when looking for causal connections, because false negatives carry greater risks. Mistake the wind rustling in the leaves for a predator, you get briefly startled; mistake a predator for the wind rustling in the leaves, you get permanently dead, etc. This may be why superstitions and religions are so persistent, because of our evolved tendency to see causal patterns and intentional supernatural agents where there are none.

Idea 6: sustained, evasive randomness intensifies superstition

Usually the kind of randomness evoked for the origins of religion are plain old environmental randomness, like natural disasters, weather patterns, finding animals to eat (like fish) or not finding them, etc. But that kind of randomness comes and goes. In the lab, you can make people more superstitious by increasing the level of randomness in the experiments, basically by evading their predictions of cause and effect. If you’re interested in how this effect has been measured, check out this article, or this one, or this one, or this one.

Idea 7: female sexual response is a constant source of sustained, evasive randomness

If female sexual response has actually evolved to be cryptic in order to impose a test of worthiness on men (measured as a combination of many complex factors, including physical attributes, intelligence, perceptiveness, kindness, creativity, patience, attentiveness, etc, potentially with a different ideal mix for each woman), then this would act as a constant, pervasive source of unpredictability in our environment, which would have promoted the superstitious, religious psychological response more consistently than luck-of-the-draw evironmental randomness in our ancestors’ daily lives.

Conclusion: the evolved complexity of female sexual response actively promotes superstition, and may be partially responsible for the origins or religion, which seems to have started with “fertility magic” over 35,000 years ago, ie check out the Hohle Fels Venus.

And how would you test this theory? Easy: it predicts that men in relationships with women who rarely or never have orgasms will be more religious/superstitious than men who reliably get their partners off, and women who are pleased well and often will be less religious than women whose bodies are more mysterious, both to their partners and themselves.

Of course, it might be hard to tell whether religious people are just having fewer orgasms because they are religious, rather than vice versa, but that’s for scientists to sort out. Fully cited article coming soon!