Baba Brinkman

In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Brinkman worked with Wesleyan University professor Gary Yohe, a senior contributor to the IPCC and co-recipient along with Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, to produce a new song and video entitled "Erosion", summarizing data from the National Climate Assessment on the US-based physical impacts of climate change.

In 2015, Brinkman was commissioned by Arizona State University and Dr. Randolph Nesse to write and produce an album entitled "The Rap Guide to Medicine", which communicates themes from evolutionary medicine. Dr. Nesse said of the finished project: "This is amazing. I won't need to teach my course, I'll just have students listen to the album!" The album includes songs about Mendelian disease, parasitology, somatic evolution in cancer, mismatch theory, and senescence.

In 2015 Brinkman's play "Rap Guide to Climate Chaos" premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, followed by performances at the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference. "Climate Chaos" went on to play-off-Broadway for six months in 2016, and featured Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Naomi Oreskes and Bill Nye as talkback speakers. Bill Nye also features on the album version of "Climate Chaos", rapping the chorus of the track "What's Beef", which remixes a Notorious B.I.G. song to discuss climate change denial. "Rap Guide to Climate Chaos" summarizes the science, politics, and economics of climate change and advocates for a global carbon tax as part of the solution.

Brinkman's next play, "Rap Guide to Religion," premiered at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, before transferring to the Soho Playhouse for an off-Broadway run in October 2014. The production ran for seven months and was a Time Out New York and New York Times Critics' Pick, as well as receiving a 2015 Drama Desk Award nomination in the category "Unique Theatrical Experience". The show explores theories from the cognitive science of religion and promotes religious naturalism, prompting American Humanist Association magazine to refer to Brinkman as "atheism's best salesman".

In 2014 and 2016, Brinkman attended the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ, performing a "Rap Up" or daily rap summary of the conference talks on Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind. Computational neuroscientist Anil Seth saw Brinkman's performances and proposed they collaborate on a new show about the neuroscience of consciousness. Brinkman premiered "Rap Guide to Consciousness" at the 2017 Brighton Fringe, Winnipeg Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe to critical acclaim. The show explores several neurobiological theories of consciousness, including Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and Predictive Coding, as well as the Philosophical Zombie, Free Will, Materialism, and Memetics.

Brinkman was commissioned by the WILD Foundation to produce "The Rap Guide to Wilderness" in 2014. The album was critically acclaimed and features songs about biodiversity, extinction, conservation, habitat loss and trophic cascade.

Brinkman and his wife, the neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin, co-wrote and performed in a science comedy variety show entitled "Off The Top" at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014, 2015, and 2017 about the neuroscience of improvisation and freestyle rap. The Rap Guide to Evolution won the National Center for Science Education's 2013 Friend of Darwin Award.

Brinkman is married to cognitive neuroscientist and television host Dr. Heather Berlin. They have a daughter, Hannah, born in 2013, and a son, Dylan, born in 2016.

In March 2012, Brinkman was announced as a songwriter-in-residence at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) and spent a month at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as a guest of the Institute, along with DJ and music producer Jamie Simmonds. Brinkman later released "The Infomatic EP," a collection of hip-hop songs inspired by computational biology.

Brinkman himself has been described as an "evangelical atheist" and has blogged about his encounters with creationists, both in educational settings and within his own family. He also performed in support of the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers "Rock Beyond Belief" concert alongside Richard Dawkins at Fort Bragg, NC in 2012.

"Finding 'God' in the Female Orgasm" The Evolutionary Review, Volume 3, May 2012

In 2011, Brinkman premiered "The Canterbury Tales Remixed" at the Soho Playhouse in New York City. The show combined material from Rapconteur with new adaptations of The Merchant's Tale, The Pardoner's Tale, and The Wife of Bath's Tale and was released as a full-length album in 2012.

"The Speciation of Rap" The Evolutionary Review, Volume 2, March 2011

Brinkman's 2010 follow-up show, "Rapconteur," premiered at the Edinburgh Free Fringe and featured hip hop adaptations of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Finnish Kalevala.

In 2010 Brinkman produced a "Rationalist Anthem" called "Off That," attacking various forms of pseudoscience. The song was inspired by the Jay Z track of the same name, which is featured on The Blueprint 3 album. The video for Brinkman's unauthorized remix was released as part of an online science music festival called Geek Pop and was popular with atheist blogs.

Brinkman followed up his Darwin tribute with a sequel show specifically about evolutionary psychology, "The Rap Guide to Human Nature," which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. The album features "peer review" phone messages from David Buss, Olivia Judson, and David Sloan Wilson commenting on the science content in Brinkman's lyrics. In 2012 "Human Nature" was adapted into a theatre production, "Ingenious Nature," which ran off-Broadway from November 2012 through January 2013.

The Rap Guide to Evolution premiered at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, winning a Fringe First Award from The Scotsman for best new theatre writing. In 2010 the UK's largest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, provided grant funding for Brinkman to make a series of educational music videos based on the show, as a resource for biology teachers. The Rap Guide to Evolution completed a five-month Off-Broadway theatre run in November 2011, for which Brinkman received a 2012 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance, losing to Irish actor Cillian Murphy.

2009: Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams in the Western Wilderness

In 2008, Brinkman was commissioned to write a new rap show about evolution by Professor Mark Pallen, microbiologist and author of The Rough Guide to Evolution. The result was "The Rap Guide to Evolution," a hip hop homage to Charles Darwin which Brinkman first performed in Britain for the Darwin bicentennial in February 2009. Because the lyrics were fact-checked for scientific accuracy, Professor Pallen calls it "the first peer-reviewed rap". Brinkman cites Richard Dawkins, David Sloan Wilson, Jared Diamond, Geoffrey Miller, and E. O. Wilson as his influences in writing the show.

Because of his interest in merging hip-hop and classic literature, Brinkman has referred to his style of rap as "Lit Hop," which was also the title of his 2006 solo rap album.

Brinkman first gained widespread media attention for his one-man show "The Rap Canterbury Tales," devised as a means of re-telling Chaucer's iconic stories for a modern audience. The show premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2004, and the following year Brinkman was sponsored by Cambridge University to perform the show in British secondary schools. The Rap Canterbury Tales was published as an illustrated paperback by Talon Books in 2006.

Dirk Murray "Baba" Brinkman (born October 22, 1978) is a Canadian rapper and playwright best known for recordings and performances that combine hip hop music with literature, theatre, and science.