The origin of the punk species

If Charles Darwin was alive today, I think he would be very interested in punk-rock.

(Greg Graffin, in Anarchy Evolution)

The questioning of dogma and authority is what binds together two otherwise very different worlds: punk-rock and evolutionary biology. There is only one person suited to make this link – Greg Graffin, the lead singer of the group Bad Religion for over 30 years and a Doctorate in paleontology (teaching at UCLA in his spare time). He recounts his experiences in his book Anarchy Evolution (subtitled Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God), published in 2010 by It Books.

The image of Greg Graffin’s double life is odd. At a young age, he fell in love with two different domains: music and science. The book is neither a typical autobiography, a testament to science or atheism, nor a punk manifesto – yet at the same time it’s a mixture of all of the above. The book cleverly balances Graffin’s two sides, creating a bridge between music and science in a unique manner.

The Process of Belief

Greg Graffin affirmed he wanted to be a singer when he was 9 years-old. His passion for science was born after reading Origins by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, around the same time he formed his band Bad Religion. The last sentence in Origins inspired the title for his first album “We’re Only Going to Die from Our Own Arrogance.” The scene is set for Greg Graffin to lead two simultaneous careers, without ever sacrificing one for the other.

The temptation to draw exact parallels between punk and teaching evolutionary and cultural biology is strong, but Graffin warns his readers against making incorrect assumptions: “It’s important to note that the two processes [evolutionary biology and history of punk music] are quite different.” Yet it is equally difficult for someone to immerse themselves in the two worlds at once, leading Graffin to share his vision of his group in terms of an organism fighting for survival:

I used to envision each Bad Religion concert as a unique environmental opportunity. We could try to increase our popularity trait by singing better songs and giving better performances, in which case our popularity would grow. Or we could suck and lose fans, causing eventual extinction.

Most of the time, Graffin does speak – in serious terms – of evolution. Graffin aims to address the lay audience, and is more concerned with conveying a message rather than in-depth knowledge. He doesn’t try to give an academic course, but rather he distills examples here and there. He divulges a little into the history of the earth, the human lineage, genetics, and mastodons. He even uses ants as an example that nature is characterized by anarchy rather than perfection, and Tiktaalik fossils to demonstrate the transition between two lineages (fish and tetrapods, giving rise to the metacarpus).

A naturalist point of view

Evidently, religion is not in the framework for someone who is a scientific author and punk. Yet Graffin is far from being narrow-minded. He characterizes himself as a naturalist rather than an atheist – a definition with a more positive connotation:

I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer.

More importantly, he places science above the atheism debate:

I don’t promote atheism in my song or when I teach undergraduates. During my lectures about Charles Darwin, for example, I barely mention Darwin’s decisive reason for abandoning theism. Far more important is his theorizing about biological phenomena. The focus of students’ attention at the introductory level, where I teach, should be on the processes and interrelationships found in nature. The debate over whether species are specially created by a deity has only a secondary significance, and there simply isn’t time to discuss it in introductory biology class.

Although not as biting as Richard Dawkin (which the two seem to have several common acquaintances), Greg Graffin is not a huge fan of the NOMA principle, which is the idea that science and religion do not overlap. For him, there is no reason for religion to be beyond scientific inquiry. By isolating religion results in science escaping its responsibilities and is a discredit to the field.

Claims made by authorities with the tacit expectation that they should go unchallenged out of reverence to those in power are precisely the kinds of claims I like to investigate and challenge. After all, the basic practice of science requires us to test all claims by the same criteria: observation, experimentation, and verification. If scientists are willing to rule out an entire domain of human life as exempt from their methods, how can they expect anyone to respect those methods? By trying to protect themselves from a public backlash against their overwhelmingly monist viewpoint, they undercut the very point they are trying to make.

At the same time he takes a similar approach with Creationists:

I am not at all interested in leaving the door open for discussions with advocates of the modern “intelligent design” movement.

Portrait of a scientist and a young punk

Prior to being distinguished with his doctorate (@DoctorGraffin on twitter) Greg Graffin started his life as a young punk on Santa Monica Boulevard, an area of Los Angeles known for “its whores, stoners, gays, and all sorts of punks.”

Very much removed from the darker side of Los Angeles, he never took any sort of drugs. Graffin isn’t as rough around the edges, and definitely retains his intellectual side (for good measure, it helps that his friends keep him in line…).

Yet this aspect of his personality, his redemption in the arms of science, saved him from the corruption and violence that destroyed the punk scene in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

His confessions on this transition is interesting, as he explains how the educational system failed to teach evolution:

As is the case with many high school biology classes, my school downplayed evolution; though it is the key to all of biology, we got only a one-week unit on the topic. So I had to educate myself. I bought a cheap paperback version of On the Origin of Species and set a goal of reading some of it each night before bed.

Beyond the lack of class time dedicated to the subject, Graffin asserts the quality of information disseminated was also poor. He recalls a presentation he gave to his class on evolution, and although his information was flawed he was still rewarded with praise:

I explained to my classmates that evolution was based on competition and that some forms of life were better at living than others. I told the class that all evolution tends toward perfection, and that, despite numerous false starts and dead ends, the most successful and elaborate evolutionary lineage was the human species. I said that all human attributes were originally adaptations to life on the Savannah in Africa.

Much of what I said in that lecture was wrong. […] But I received an A in that class, and my teacher wrote on my report card “Gave a great talk on evolution.”

Anarchy at UCLA

The book leaves a few things to be desired. In particular the readers may not find much exciting happened during Greg Graffin’s life as a student. He does touch on the subject, giving an anecdote of a time he politely turned down a Brazilian groupie because he had to get up early the next morning to go do field research with his biology class. Any other rock-star would have snickered at the decision to turn down a girl for trees. Yet for a naturalist worthy of the title, the teachings of Darwin had a higher calling:

What kind of man in the prime of his life would turn down the advances of beautiful Brazilian women and instead head out to look at birds, trees, reptiles and amphibians? But this particular visit was the culmination of a dream that began in high school, when I read Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.

In another indication of the rigors of academic life, his expedition to Bolivia turns into a bizarre fiasco for the young and enthusiastic student. The passages in the book are among the best and give a humorous reflection of scientific work.

As part of a “nature reserve project,” Graffin was hired as “collector of birds and mammals.” In fact the mission consisted of shooting, trapping, strangling and killing anything that moved. The expedition oscillates between profound boredom and nauseating moments. His boat was named El Tigre de Los Angeles, with a saber-toothed tiger for a logo and a reserved group of coworkers. The Canadian summarized this predicament in a single phrase: “What the fuck am I doing here ?’” He recounts meeting the natives:

They boarded El Tigre de Los Angeles as if they didn’t need permission. I waved and said, ‘hola! Me llamo Gregorio,’ to which they responded, ‘Missionarios?’

The job ended around the coup d’état, leaving Greg to return on a plane which had “God is my copilot!” written on the side.

Being mistaken for a missionary and having “God as his copilot” are just a few of the many adventure for Bad Religion’s singer. Luckily, Greg Graffin is a dual individual.

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Article originally published on Le bLoug

Photo Credits: Cover Illustrations for Anarchy Evolution and Tiktaalik BW by Nobu Tamura [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons; The Adolescents by paxpuig , p373

Translation: Stefanie Chernow

Anarchy Evolution – Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without god, par Greg Graffin & Steve Olson, It Books, September 2010, 304 Pages, $22.99