Stephen Baird is a singer-songwriter, and member of The Galapagos Mountain Boys. His specialty is adapting and parodying Christmas carols and religious hymns, replacing their original content with scientific and secular themes and lyrics.

Personal History

Stephen Miller Baird was born April 18, 1944 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was raised in the Bible Belt

Bible Belt

Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the southeastern and south-central United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average.The...

 before converting to rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

 as a student at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. There he met Carol Davidson, whom he married in 1970. They have two sons and several grandchildren.

He went on to earn his MD from Stanford in 1971, specialized in research in Leukemias and Lymphoma, and is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Pathology at UCSD

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

's Moores Cancer Center. He still practices anatomic & clinical pathology in San Diego, California. His current area of research at UCSD is in murine leukemia virus receptors.

Musical History

Stephen Baird was forced to play cello as a child, but let that training lapse. He learned to play guitar in the 1980's and began putting medical and scientific concepts to music while teaching medical school classes. His bluegrass style is applied to topics ranging from gravity to sexually transmitted diseases to false gods. He released his first album of self-described "scientific gospel" music in 1998. In 2000 he formed the band The Opossums of Truth with like-minded individuals Dwight Worden, Mike McColm, Ron Jackson and son Daniel Baird. Upon Jackson's untimely death in 2007, the band reformed as The Galapagos Mountain Boys.

First with The Opossums of Truth and now with The Galapagos Mountain Boys, Baird has been a performer at Darwin Day

Darwin Day

Darwin Day is a recently instituted celebration intended to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809. The day is used to highlight Darwin's contribution to science and to promote science in general.-History:...

events since 2002, drawing on his stable of tunes on evolution and natural selection.

Discography

Dr. Stephen Baird has released six albums of scientific gospel music:

• Hallelujah! Evolution! (1998)
• Ain't Gonna Be No Judgment Day (2002)
• Water On Mars (2003)
• Breakin' the Rules (2004)
• Darwin, Darn It! (2009)
• And For THIS You Expect A PhD?! (2009)