Then I did a study-it was really good-our biology teacher let us do anything that interested us and to do a presentation to the class. I read the Voyage of the Beagle when I was 14. I didn’t know anything about human origins. There was no story telling, no origin myth. A vast cultural difference, particularly for young people. You can imagine the difference between Los Angeles and Wisconsin. My parents divorced and I went to Los Angeles with my Mother when I was 11. But it didn’t answer any of the big religious questions. It just so happened that my colleagues at the time were also teenagers in a very vibrant movement-some would say it’s a musical movement-of Southern California Punk. I didn’t know jack shit! Now I’m 52 and know a little bit more, although there is still a lot I don’t know …I happened to be in Los Angeles, I happened to be cultivating an interest in popular music. When I’m talking about myself here, I’m talking about when I was fifteen years old.

When you talk about human behavior, you have to look at it with an appropriate lens. Greg Graffin: It’s real hard to divorce my philosophy from the fact that I was a teenager when I started this. On evolution and punk rock as cut from the same cloth We were happy to oblige.Ībridged conversation between Greg Graffin (GG), David Sloan Wilson (DSW), and Kevin Kniffin (KK) on the intersection between punk rock and “this view of life” (evolutionary theory). Greg stressed that it should be a 3-way conversation and not an interview.

The three of us met up for lunch at Cornell University’s Statler Hotel. Hockey is an important part of his life and he plays on the same team as TVOL’s sports editor, Kevin Kniffin. He lives in the vicinity of Cornell University and teaches a course on evolution for non-majors between tours.

Greg has authored three books, Evolution and Religion, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God, and Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence. His dissertation is titled “ Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist Worldview.” His interest in evolution also dates back to high school and he received his PhD from Cornell University in 2002 working with the eminent historian of science William Provine. Greg Graffin started the punk rock band Bad Religion while in high school in 1980, which is still going strong sixteen albums later. Not many people combine the lives of a touring punk rock musician and university professor.

Anarchy evolution by greg graffin