Five Good Songs About Science for Greg Graffin

“It’s a similar feeling from being in a community of punk rockers as a teenager and the feeling I still get today when I’m in a community of skeptical scientists. The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. You challenge the doctrine in order to make progress. The thrill of science is the process. It’s a social process. It’s a process of collective discovery. It’s debate, it’s experimentation and it’s verification of claims that might be false. It’s the greatest foundation for a society.”
–Greg Graffin, founder of the L.A. punk band Bad Religion, is also an evolutionary biologist at U.C.L.A. Talking to Scientific American about his new book Anarchy Evolution, he says he can’t think of a single good song about science. (He calls “She Blinded Me With Science” a “stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.”) Graffin probably knows more about both good songs and science than I do, but I beg to differ.

Maybe Graffin wouldn’t consider those songs to be really about science. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a more exacting standard for such than I do. Anyway, here he is himself, singing a song that’s not really about science either. But it’s a good song.