Baba Brinkman

Dirk Murray 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.

Born in the remote community of Riondel, British Columbia, in a log cabin built by his parents, Brinkman is the eldest of three children of Joyce Murray, a Member of the Parliament of Canada, and Dirk Brinkman, Sr., who is notable for having founded the world's only private company responsible for planting more than one billion trees.

Dirk Sr gave Brinkman the honorific nickname "Baba" at birth, because of his son's contemplative, Buddha-like expression.

Brinkman's childhood was divided between Vancouver and the Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Brinkman spent his early summers in remote tree planting camps, and began planting trees himself at the age of 15.

He worked for his parents' business, Brinkman & Associates Reforestation, for twelve seasons in British Columbia and Alberta, personally planting more than one million trees.

During this period he also earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Arts degree in comparative literature from the University of Victoria, Canada.

He studied human evolution and primatology with the orangutan researcher Biruté Galdikas and wrote his thesis comparing modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

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.

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.

In 2008, Brinkman was commissioned to write a new rap show about evolution by 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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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 2011, Brinkman premiered The Canterbury Tales Remixed at the Soho Playhouse in New York City.

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.

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.

In 2012 Human Nature was adapted into a theatre production, Ingenious Nature, which ran off-Broadway from November 2012 through January 2013.

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.

The Rap Guide to Evolution won the National Center for Science Education's 2013 Friend of Darwin Award.

and Brinkman has performed selections from his production on The Rachel Maddow Show and at the Seattle Science Festival, sharing the stage with Jurassic Park palaeontologist Jack Horner and British physicist Stephen Hawking.

Brinkman's next play, The Rap Guide to Religion, premiered at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, before transferring to the Soho Playhouse for an off-Broadway run in October 2014.

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.

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 2015, Brinkman was commissioned by Arizona State University and Randolph M. Nesse to write and produce an album titled The Rap Guide to Medicine, which communicates themes from evolutionary medicine.

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.