Origins

What happens when you mix rock music with evolution?

You get Darwin Rocks!, a team of eager ecologists who have made a music video and a computer game to get people interested in Charles Darwin’s seminal theory. The scientists, from the University of Tübingen in Germany, have put together a music clip called “Struggle for Love” featuring a rock soundtrack designed to grab the attention of 15- to 25-year-olds. “We were aiming for a simple message,” says team leader Nico Michiels. “Most people misunderstand what evolution is all about: In the end all that counts is reproduction.”

The video opens with a Darwin look-alike scientist staring intently into a petri dish. The dish contains a strange sci-fi world where the “survival of the fittest” is battled out by microscopic people on a tiny soccer pitch. Several generations later, it’s not the team with the strongest and most ambitious players that wins but the team with the most players—that is, the one that reproduces most. “That’s why the song is written around love and reproduction, instead of focusing on strength,” says Michiels. “Also, we used [sports] to attract the attention of people who would never normally look at a clip like this.”

The video was made in collaboration with students from music schools in Heidelberg and Mannheim and a film school in Munich and thus received a lot of input from the age group it is targeting, says Michiels.

The team also designed a computer game based on the idea that it’s not just animals and plants that evolve—so can music. The game starts with a "musical primordial soup" where the user selects tunes he or she likes from a list. Based on that subset, the program creates "offspring" tunes, which the user also rates. This process of listening and rating hones the evolution of the music. “The user is basically the selective environment. They stand for natural selection,” explains Michiels.

Michiels says the music video and game are nonprovocative ways of demonstrating evolution: “I’d rather generate curiosity about evolution instead of being critical about other people’s beliefs,” he says. “If you provoke moderately religious people, you might lose them. But if we just talk about evolution, you might just win them.”

The video and game were made after the team won a German “creativity contest,” in which evolutionary scientists had to come up with innovative ways of presenting Darwin’s theory. Both Michiels's team and the contest were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

—Claire Thomas