ON VIEW
The Rap Guide to Evolution
Image courtesy of Baba Brinkman.
By Danielle McCloskey
Contributor
Having grown up in suburban Canada, planting
trees and loving hip-hop, rapper Baba Brinkman
jokes that he is uniquely qualified to tell this story.
Brinkman, whose master’s thesis explored the
connections between hip-hop and Chaucer, has
been recording music and co-writing hip-hop
theater shows since 2004. It was his Canterbury
Tales Remixed that garnered him popularity in
2008, and is what brought him to the attention
of geneticist Mark Pallen. Pallen is the author
of The Rough Guide to Evolution, and it didn’t
take long before Pallen asked Brinkman to write
an entertainment show for his upcoming symposium, the Darwin Bicentennial. In draft form,
Brinkman’s lyrics were checked for scientific
accuracy, making The Rap Guide to Evolution the
first “peer-reviewed” rap. Now The Rap Guide to
16
Evolution tours around the world, co-exploring
the evolutionary roots of rap music and humans, framing the culturally-evolved art form
of rap as a set of subjects and behaviors with
underlying adaptive rationales that follow Darwinian logic.
The Rap Guide to Evolution has us view Darwinian Theory and evolutionary psychology
through a pop culture lens, making connections
between human behavior and urban survival
with the challenges faced by organisms struggling to survive and r W&