Entertainment

Entertaining ‘Evolution’ a Dar-winner

Anyone who’s napped through high school biology will appreciate the remedial education Baba Brinkman offers in “The Rap Guide to Evolution,” an audacious one-man show on Darwin’s theories.

In hip-hop style, the Canadian rapper delivers a combination lecture/concert featuring such numbers as “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest,” the latter a hit by the group Mobb Deep.

Brinkman, who previously did a rap adaptation of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” undertook this project at the suggestion of a university professor, who serves as its technical consultant.

Prepare yourself for detailed descriptions of such subjects as multicellularity, endosymbiosis and mitochondria. But even those subjects aren’t dry — not with Brinkman assuming the persona of a gangsta rapper, say, to illustrate the principle of biomimicry. Making the case that every living human can trace his or her ancestry to Africa, he encourages an audience call-and-response to the Dead Prez song “I’m a African.”

He also delivers a detailed description of animal mating rituals to prove the contention that “nature is kinky as hell.” It’s accompanied by film footage so explicit that one woman promptly hustled her child out of the theater.

Not surprisingly, Brinkman has little use for creationists. Referring to scientific detractors of Darwin’s theories, he bluntly declares, “There are none.” And he lambastes social Darwinism as a theory encouraged by “parasites, psychopaths, eugenicists and deregulated traders of economic derivatives.”

Aided by Wendall K. Harrington’s vivid projections, “The Rap Guide to Evolution” is as fun as it is informative. You’ll probably sing along with his concluding, common-sense ode to sexual selection, “Don’t Sleep With Mean People.”