Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, writer and performer. He is the author of “The Rap Guide to Evolution”, a hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology, written for the Darwin Bicentennial in 2009, covering Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Evolutionary Psychology. The show was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and has since become so popular with teachers requesting its use in their classrooms that he is launching a new campaign supported by the Wellcome Trust to teach evolution in schools using music videos based on his show alongside a host of other educational resources.

Baba Brinkman will launch his new campaign on Wednesday 25th May at the Prince Charles Cinema, London: tickets available now. Nature Network London talked to Baba ahead of the launch.

Hello, Baba, welcome to Nature Network! A little bit of background first: before The Rap Guide to Evolution, your first show was the Rap Canterbury Tales?

Yes. My background is not so much science: I did my degree in literature and my thesis on the Canterbury Tales. I sort of got it into my head as a grad student that the Canterbury Tales was the rap of its time. Rap is the Chaucerian equivalent of today – more so than other forms of poetry because Chaucer (and also Shakespeare) were public performance poets as opposed to silent publishing writers. I thought that had a lot in common with rap so I wrote my thesis about aural traditions and rap and did the rap Canterbury Tales as a show to illustrate that point.

How did that lead onto the Rap Guide to Evolution?

The idea came from Dr Mark Pallen, the author of the Rough Guide to Evolution. He saw me do the Rap Canterbury Tales and asked me to write a three minute Darwin rap for an event he was organising. The original one short rap in 2007 was just a one off, but he contacted me again in 2008 to say that next year was the Darwin Bicentennial and if I could do a whole one hour rap on the Origin of Species, he could set me up with some science gigs. I just thought that sounded like a great idea so I took up the gauntlet.

Your show has been so successful with teachers and students that you’re now launching a campaign for teaching evolution in schools using the Rap Guide to Evolution as a basis. Was it always your aim to become a science populariser?

My general agenda is to be an everything populariser. Science popularisation just feels like a point on a spectrum which I started with the Canterbury Tales. I thought ‘this is brilliant work, so why is it not more generally appreciated?’ As a medieval scholar I felt that about Chaucer and then I came across other things where people have the same instinct. You feel like Darwin’s theory is so accessible and sheds so much light on the world: why aren’t you more excited? I think a lot of people feel the same way about cosmology or psychology or whatever their field is; academics feel ‘if people only got this it would illuminate their world’. I was approached by various people from various disciplines after the Canterbury Tales saying if you can do this for Chaucer, why not do my subject next but nothing felt like the right thing. Then Mark Pallen said "What about Darwin? and I really didn’t have to think about it for very long – I thought yep, that’s the next project! I wanted something to open new vistas and when he suggested Darwin, I thought ’that’s the thing that can become a segway to every new project’ because everything relates back to it.

I was very keen – I threw myself into it with a vengeance. I had to brush up because of course people who’ve spent their whole lives studying evolutionary biology feel strongly about having it communicated accurately and not misrepresented. So I definitely had to do some reading!

Did you work with Dr Pallen a lot to ensure the content was accurate?

Yes. I’d initially send him a proposed outline of what I was going to write and a series of chapter themes that I wanted to talk about. Then as I was writing the lyrics, I sent him drafts of the lyrics and he came back with feedback like “I don’t think people will get this” or “you could find a clearer way to say this” or “that part’s not very well known”. But he never sent me completely back to the drawing board.

You’ve talked about how you want to engage people with evolution. Do you think rap helps you reach out to new audiences who think they aren’t interested in science?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve performed this show in a number of colleges and high schools as well as at festivals for older groups of people and the general response is “I never thought of it that way”. Not much in the show is completely original. It’s the most fascinating kernels from a number of different popular science books I read. The original part is connected to hip hop culture – all of these familiar themes that you listen to in songs on a daily basis can be related to evolution. One of the most popular connections is between the concept of bling and the peacock’s tail. You can think of bling as a costly signal, a conspicuous waste of resources and an honest communication of surplus. This is how most of the ostentatious displays in nature come about through sexual selection and the cultural equivalent is application of visible wealth. It’s a totally familiar thing in hip hop, but many people just find it baffling – “what’s with all the jewels?” But when you think of it in terms of signals for sexual selection, it becomes completely understandable, even if you’re not doing it yourself.

Even if you’re not doing it yourself, you can look at what you are doing?

Exactly. That’s the point. Everyone engages in displays of competition in one way or another, whether you’re showing off your book learning by using sesquipedalian words or your bank account by wearing diamonds or your connections by name-dropping. Everyone has subtle little status competition signals.

As well as explaining the concepts, do you think students find rap’s rhyme and rhythm help with remembering facts? For example, mnemonics are often used in schools.

Yes, absolutely, but I don’t think there’s anything exclusive to rap about that, I think that’s rhyme and it applies to catchphrases and jungles in advertising and what you’re really getting at is catchiness or memorability which is a memetic concept. Trying to engineer a way to express your idea or concept that’s going to get it reproduced more times in the neurons of your listeners and can outcompete other forms of expression.

Once I started reading about meme theory and cultural evolution, it made me think about what I was doing for a living, rapping: what rappers are trying to do is come up with the catchiest way to communicate with people and express their ideas and view of the world. That’s a game that I play, a game that every rapper plays, a game that rhyme plays a crucial role in. Not all rappers are aware of what they’re doing, of the Darwinian component to it and a lot of rappers have responded very positively to that side of the show. I say, if you want to understand how evolution works, just look at hip hop and ask yourself why this rapper finds his way onto your playlist and this rapper gets deleted when you run out of hard drive space. That difference right there is the difference between someone proliferating or going extinct at a local level and evolution is driven entirely by those local distinctions, variation and competition.

So your show is actually teaching science and music?

Yes. I think the assumption most people have is that I’ll just be rapping about evolution: it will be rap in its form and evolution in its content. What I’ve really tried to do is reverse those poles as often as possible and show how rap itself is formed by evolution and the behavioural patterns associated with rap can all be explained through a combination of cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. It sort of turns the lens back on its source and that’s the part that people don’t expect. What I’ve also done is create space for me to create awareness in the current moment because I’m rapping about rap as a product of evolution so I can pause and say “what you’re hearing is an example of evolution in action and how you react to what I’m saying right now will determine the future proliferation of my memes”. It’s working in the exact same way as it works in the natural world and it really brings it home to the audience – not only do I get this but I’m part of it and it’s happening right now. Once you see evolution through that lens, you start to be able to apply it to all sorts of other things as well; it broadens the horizons a bit.

Your new campaign is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Yes. I think I’m the first ever Wellcome sponsored rapper!

Have you found the scientists and the scientific world in general are quite positive about your work or are they initially sceptical?

I think it’s a scientist’s job to be initially sceptical, but I’ve been given the benefit of the doubt insofar as they’ll give me a hearing. They’re understandably protective of their sphere because there are clear standards for what counts as science and what doesn’t and there are more and less accurate representations of how it works. It helps that I was first brought in and vouched for by a scientist. I got quite lucky too – the first ever performance I did of the show was at the chemistry lecture hall in Cambridge which Dr Pallen had set up as part of the Darwin Bicentennial and there was a writer from Science in the audience. The day after the first performance he wrote a piece on the Science blog saying you should go and see this show which was terrific.

Every scientist who’s told me they’ve seen the show has had a really positive response. None of them have said “This is a degradation of Darwin” or anything, because I think they can see the benefit of reaching a crowd you can’t necessarily reach with a lecture.

The other people who have really taken to it are the general public: you’ve raised £12,000 through www.crowdfunder.co.uk. That’s a huge amount of money from donations: do you know who these people are and why they’ve chosen to support you?

I think they’re just people who care about science. It seems like a really diverse group. And I’m going to slightly correct you because they’re not really donations that they’re giving. What they’re doing is pre-buying the finished product before we’re finished making it. That’s the way the Crowdfunder model works: it’s sort of like a fan-funding programme. A lot of bands do it as well, they say we’re going to sell you a record before it’s finished and that’ll give us the budget to make a really great record. It’s an interesting financial model that lots of artists are using. Of course there has to be interest and I was really quite proud of that because there was a gambit involved. The way Crowdfunder works, you say we’ll raise this much money in this much time and if you don’t raise it you don’t get any money, so not only have you ended up with nothing but you’ve also proved that there isn’t popular support for what you’re doing which can be a little disheartenening. So Crowdfunder shows you’re really committed. Lots of people who supported us were buying immortality – people who pledged £30 or more could have their photo placed in the videos. We have a collage of a human family tree showing photos of people of different ethnicities of branches of the tree to show that we’re all African under the skin, part of the great tree of life, so people have been sending me photos from all around the world for the project.

The other great thing is that there were about 300 people who contributed money to the project and those are 300 people who care about the project and will help me promote it when it comes out, will be sharing it with friends, have a copy on their shelves, which is all great for general dissemination.

You’re launching your new campaign now and then taking The Rap Guide to Evolution off-Broadway. Do you have any thoughts on what’s next after that?

I think the Rap Guide To concept has potential. I’ve already done the Rap Guide to Human Nature which is about evolutionary psychology, which I put together for the Edinburgh Fringe last year. There’s been an expression of interest from NYU Business School to do the Rap Guide to Business and I’ve had at least three different scientists and engineers reach out to me and suggest the Rap Guide to Climate Change. Those are the most prominent on my radar at the moment, but I try to treat it as an evolutionary process – some people have that far seeing clarity, the next thing I’m going to be doing is this and in five years I see myself here, but I’m much more trial and error, proliferate and prune. There’s a pretty wide range of possible Rap Guides out there and I’ve got to give Dr Pallen the credit because the title The Rap Guide to Evolution was his suggestion. I thought it was too obvious but eventually decided to go for it and not only is it a great title for the project, but it’s opened up a huge range of possible sequels which hadn’t really occurred to me. So we’ll try to make the Rap Guide a whole ten volume series on your shelf!

How long does it take you to compose a rap?

My general rate is I produce about a minute’s worth of writing in an hour. A three and half minute rap will take three to four hours to write, but that’s the just the composition: the research part can take me five or six times that.

Do you listen to rap in your free time? Who are your musical influences?

I listen to rap constantly. The Notorious B.I.G. is one of my rap heroes. The rapper Nas is quite high up there. I’m a big fan of Atmosphere from Minneapolis. There’s a rapper from Canada called Shad K who I think is one of the best lyricists out there right now.

And your scientific inspirations?

I read E.O. Wilson quite a lot when I was first exploring evolution and I’m a big fan of Jared Diamond. I’ve read virtually all of Richard Dawkins’ books, save two or three I’m still saving. David Sloan Wilson is a big influence, Evolution for Everyone. I really like Matt Ridley. On the evolutionary psychology side, Geoffrey Miller: Spent and The Mating Mind are both fascinating.

Do you dream in rap?

Very very frequently! One of the things I do in my show is freestyle, which is improvising rhyme. The point I make is that freestyle is like mutation: freestyle and creativity are like mutation in evolution, the randomness that creates the unexpected successes. For me, Freestyle was a challenge to learn how to do because at first it sounded horrible and I thought there was no chance I was going to get there. But a couple of times I had dreams where I was listening to someone freestyle incredibly well, and thinking, in the dream, I’ll never get to be this good because it’s so impressive. A few times this happened, then one time I woke up and thought “Wait a second. That was coming from me!” It had to have been coming from me at some level because where else could it have come from? And that told me I could do it and I was going to practice until I was good as the rappers I was overawed by in my dreams

Thank you very much for talking to us today, Baba, and good luck with the campaign! Readers: tickets for the launch event are still available from the Prince Charles Cinema. Hope to see you there!