The unifying theme is just the question on whether we can view the world from the perspective of ecology, of the community of populations living together. Graffin: I think the unifying theme here isn’t as broad as all the examples. When did you start piecing together the elements that we see in the book? Paste: Population Wars puts together a concise worldview through a lot of different means, examples and research. They write treatises, and it’s not easy to summarize that in an introduction.”Īnd though this short Q&A won’t unpack the meat of his book, either, Graffin spoke with Paste about building the worldview that exists within Population Wars, which is out now via St. “This is a call-back to the books of previous authors who write about large, sweeping worldviews. Here, Graffin recognizes competition among the human race-specifically, through questioning Darwin’s idea of a “war of nature”-and frames it through a biological lens: Why do we compete for space, resources and ideologies on Earth? And is it more natural to view these things through the viewpoint of cooperation and assimilation?īut that’s just a summary of Graffin’s work, and it’s true that the 258 pages within Population Wars are necessary ones: “People want me to summarize these views in 30 seconds or less, and I respectfully pass,” Graffin says. Population Wars takes his point of view one step further, re-imagining the purpose of global competition-from sheer survival, to occupying space, to the justifications that fall between-and relating it back to our modern view on war.

Graffin, who spends his time off the road as a lecturer at Cornell University, has already approached long-form writing once with Anarchy Evolution, which threaded together his work in the science world with his decades-long Bad Religion catalog for a deeply personal presentation of Graffin’s worldview. Unlike Greg Graffin’s songs with seminal punk band Bad Religion, the ideas contained within his latest book, Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence, are not easily summed up in a few distorted minutes.

Evolution and religion greg graffin