Greg Graffin
SPEAKING CLIENT
Greg Graffin, Lead Singer of Bad Religion and Professor of Biology at UCLA
Artistic Evolution: An Evening With Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin
As an evolutionary biologist, Greg Graffin knows that nothing is stagnant – everything evolves over time. At the age of fifteen, he stumbled upon the seeds of lifelong inspiration: punk rock and biology. For Graffin, these disparate passions have grown together over time, spawning an incredibly prolific career both as Bad Religion’s front man and as a teaching scientist who often examines the relationship between religion and evolutionary biology. At the podium, he shares his unique perspective on the arts and sciences and his life as a modern Renaissance man.
Greg Graffin was a typical disenfranchised young teen living in the wasteland of the San Fernando Valley when he first heard punk music on KROQ’s “Rodney on the ROQ,” radio show. The growing hardcore punk scene that the show exposed him to gave Graffin the meaning and hope he’d sought since moving west from Wisconsin at eleven years old. Around the same time, school – which seldom held Graffin’s attention – suddenly became interesting as his teachers introduced biology. From The Germs to actual bacterium, an artistic fire was ignited. If Darby Crash could infuse punk with poetry, why not start a band that thrashed hard but also wrote music with a heavy dose of lyrics, a touch of harmony and a scientific bent? In 1980 Graffin formed Bad Religion with friends including guitarist Brett Gurewitz and bassist Jay Bentley. Over the years, Bad Religion has released fourteen full-length albums including How Could Hell Be Any Worse? (1982), Suffer (1988), No Control (1989), Recipe for Hate (1993), The Empire Strikes First (2004) and most recently, New Maps of Hell (2007). Graffin has also released solo albums that dig into the roots of the stripped-down, American folk-musical tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, American Lesion (1997) and Cold As The Clay (2006).
Graffin’s career as an evolutionary biologist has been equally productive and provocative. With undergraduate and master’s degrees from UCLA (anthropology and geology, respectively) and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Cornell, he has focused on the incompatibility of religion and science, particularly in regard to evolution. For Graffin, being an outspoken scientist with a gift for making complex scientific thought easy for average people to understand is as subversive as the music he plays. And equally as expressive. Greg Graffin lives with his family in Ithaca, New York, tours regularly and teaches evolutionary biology at UCLA.
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