"If Charles Darwin were alive today, I think he would find something very attractive about punk rock."

Writes Greg Graffin in "Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God." Graffin was (is?) the lead singer of the rock group Bad Religion and he's now a professor of life Sciences at UCLA.

At 16, he took the final words from Richard Leakey's and Roger Lewin's book, "Origins" ("To have arrived on this Earth ... only to depart it through arrogance, would be the ultimate irony") as inspiration for Bad Religion's first noteworthy song, "We're Only Going to Die from Our Own Arrogance." It was recorded for the band's 1981 debut album....

In his book, Graffin says a detailed study of evolution led him to become a "naturalist," a scientist who believes the overall story of species' development or failure is more complex than "survival of the fittest."...

Organisms, Graffin says, adapt, for better or worse, to changes in their environment and to the constant absorption of new traits through procreation. Evolution is anarchic — something, he says, is true of punk culture as well as the world at large.