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 Religions 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 KROQs Rodney on the ROQ, radio show. The growing hardcore punk scene that the show exposed him to gave Graffin the meaning and hope hed 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), New Maps of Hell (2007), The Dissent of Man (2010), True North (2013), and Age of Unreason (2019). Graffin has also released two solo albums, American Lesion (1997), Cold As The Clay (2006), and Millport (2017).

Gaffin has also helped write three books. Throughout 2003, Graffin was engaged in an ongoing email discussion with Preston Jones, a historian at the Christian John Brown University in Arkansas and fan of Bad Religion. The informal philosophical debate that resulted was published as a book titled Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant? A Professor and Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity in 2006. In 2009, Gaffin co-wrote Anarchy Evolution with author Steve Olson and, in 2015, Gaffin published The Population Wars.

Graffin's career as an evolutionary biologist has been equally productive and provocative. With undergraduate and masters 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.