The Rap Guide To Evolution

There are big names behind this show which starts with some stunning visual film sequences from the Wellcome Trust. Dr Mark Pallen, author of The Rough Guide to Evolution, made sure it had sufficient scientific rigour and it stars Baba Brinkman, one of the world’s great intelligent rappers.

The show sets out to do two things – make a comparison between the evolution of Rap and Darwin’s theories of evolution; and portray both sides of the ongoing creationist / evolutionist argument.

It does so in a mixture of PowerPoint slides (yes, typical of scientific conferences – text-heavy, featuring quotes from Darwin, read out verbatim or paraphrased) - groan; original and parody rap numbers – great; conversational narrative - fast! The pace of the show goes at the speed of … well, almost as speedily as you’d need to travel to get from dinosaur to twitterer in 5 minutes. Slackers beware – the words come fast and furious and almost feel like a bombardment of Socratic dialogue at some points. You need to listen very carefully to follow the thread of thought, which is logical and well-presented. There are moments of relief, but I did feel a bit as if Baba was rushing to cram seventy-five minutes worth of material into a sixty-minute slot.

What Baba does is amazing – his knowledge of rap genres and styles is encyclopaedic (the guy’s done a degree on Chaucer and rap, for heaven’s sakes)! He’s obviously read up on the evolutionist arguments. He does indulge in laying logical traps for the audience to fall into, failing to sufficiently define terms such as ‘nature’ or ‘Africa(n)’ until after he’s laid out the arguments, which leaves the potential for audience members to be drawn down familiar paths only to find out they’ve had the ground (whether logical or high moral or other) removed from under their feet. It’s a suspect strategy, but it eliminates the chance attentive listeners will opt out from the beginning if they don’t buy into the given definitions of terms, or at least, as I did, listen with caution to his arguments while his terms remained undefined.

His most interesting – and original – argument has to do with the link he makes between a Canadian study of homicide statistics and the rap phenomenon. He is keen to explain, not justify, he says, then comes out with statements like, ‘Darwin’s left Freud in the dustbin,’ which he then explains and ends up justifying … brilliantly.

The show ends in a flash of verbal fireworks, with Baba exclaiming, ‘the truth hurts – that’s how evolution works.’ He likens truth to acid burning into the mind to dissolve pride. With the enthusiasm of a zealot, however well-presented his arguments are, he is in danger of dissolving people’s hopes, dreams, crutches along with their pride. Whether he ultimately succeeds in his aim of presenting evolutionism in a light so inarguably appealing that people totally embrace it – and Darwin’s utopian, universalist ideals which stem from it – remains to be seen. He certainly provides a volatile and unstable catalyst for the process.