People need to understand the basics of evolution if they are going to reject it—otherwise, they are not contributing anything productive to modern society.

Greg Graffin

Categorized in : Needs People Evolution

It's extremely hard to get rid of any population. When they say polio is essentially wiped out, it's not. If we let up on the vaccinations, it will make a come back.

polio hard population

Here's the thing, who cares what you have to look at, I'm a big advocate of not obscuring vistas, but even if you build the biggest wind farm, can it run anything more than a domestic washer and dryer and a computer, for the year? I'm sorry guys, the answer, you're going to be shocked to know: it ain't much more than that.

wind-farms sorry running

Knowledge is organized data. For it to be shelved as human knowledge it's got to be predictable, repeatable, all the basics of scientific validation have to be there.

basics validation data

When we look back on this time and we are going to see what the Internet brought us, and social media brought us, I think people are going to say 'how did people know anything in those years, during that particular time in history?' Because there is so much disorganization in the information.

media years thinking

I'm a biologist, so... Which I think should be mandatory. Biology should be mandatory. Mathematics? They say we don't know enough about math and science. Well we don't know enough about science and particularly biology, which is such a huge field.

fields math thinking

There is so much in this world to be skeptical about if you want to be a skeptical ahole. I'm kind of a skeptical ahole. But not about vaccines, that's just not one of them.

vaccines want world

The problem is, as a company, if you attempt to streamline knowledge or try to limit information you get accused of censorship. So they have to open the gates to any a**hole's opinion. It's like 'oh that opinion is valid'. No, it's not. Not all opinions are valid, you know? It's this idea that every kid gets a trophy. Yeah, but someone won the game!

games kids ideas

There's going to be competition because there are not enough resources. Resources grow arithmetically, populations grow exponentially. You can't ever have enough resources and that's the foundation of this idea of competition.

foundation competition ideas

Folk music usually has an emphasis on the lyrics and melody. And those lyrics are usually relevant in some way. And it's populist in scope, which is also true of Bad Religion. So it's more meant to draw some parallels between the two. And I think even my voice and my delivery can be thought of as a little bit folky.

voice two thinking

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

given natural people

I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

doe believe world

Creativity is a challenge. It requires us to be fully human -- autonomous yet engaged, independent yet interdependent. Creativity bridges the conflict between our individualistic and our sociality. It celebrates the commonality of our species while simultaneously setting us apart as unique individuals.

creativity independent unique

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

deities want needs

The vocal arrangements are a big part of the formula for a Bad Religion song - layered harmonies and background vocals. So when I start to describe the elements of Bad Religion's sound, it starts to sound like a Christmas choir.

elements sound song

....the songs are universal enough that in ten years time they sh... by Greg Graffin

....the songs are universal enough that in ten years time they should still hold up quite well.

enough song years

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way. by Greg Graffin

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.

quests use way

It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.

style artist sound

I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution.

song reality people

I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that.

records kids years

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue. by Greg Graffin

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.

existence-of-god existence