by David L. Brooks
In This Issue:
—The mystery of music
—The mirror of laughter
—Why do men have deeper voices than women?
—Teenagers do the stupidest things
—Altruism and group selection
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—The mystery of music
The hills (and the oceans) are alive with the sounds of music, as birds (and whales, coyotes, gibbons, etc.) trill, whistle, and howl at each other. But no other animal has quite the virtuosity of human beings.
As Donald E. Brown notes in Human Universals, music is found in every culture known to anthropology or history. This music is comprised of melody, rhythm, repetition, redundancy and variation; it is always seen as an art and a creation; it accompanies at least some dances and some religious activities; it includes singing and it includes music just for children. Children as young as five understand music and the capacity seems to be hard-wired in us. Music is obviously important to us and would seem to have been important in our evolution. The problem is: we don't know why.
Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, takes the strong position that until music is proven to have (or to have had) survival value for our species, it is just "auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Essentially, the pleasure we get from music is an evolutionary accident and "compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged."
Steven Brown doesn't think that music is an evolutionary accident. In The Origins of Music, he argues for what he calls "musilanguage." This is the notion that music and language have common origins in a "musilanguage" stage of evolution. Brown argues that the structural features shared by music and language are not the result of chance parallelism, nor are they a function of one system emerging from the other. Music and language are sound patterns and fall towards different ends of a single spectrum of acoustic expression. At one end of the spectrum lies semanticity and lexical meaning and at the other lies emotional meaning. Music and language share a common origin and then specialized: language toward "sound reference" and music toward "sound emotion."
So the two Steves disagree about the "how"; and there is no consensus about "why," either. But we don't lack for candidates. Edward Hagan opts for coalition signaling. Learning words and music—singing and perhaps dancing—allows multiple individuals to synchronize their signaling. Think of a church or community singing, or a Native American war dance. Such activities not only bring individuals together, they signal outsiders that these individuals are together: they are a coalition, they stand together, and perhaps outsiders should be careful of that fact.
There are also advocates for that evolutionary standby, sexual selection. As any aspiring high school rock 'n' roller knows, musicians get the chicks. (Do girl bands have male groupies? I think some research is needed here.) George F. Miller argues for sexual selection on strict Darwinian grounds. It's all about mate choice, and in our case, it's (mostly) about men getting the attention of fertile women. Music is about sexual signaling.
More specifically, humans need big brains to survive. And musical ability may be an indication that the possessor is healthy, and has good genes for doing the things big brains evolved to do. As Miller says,
Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. Dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength, and health. Because nervousness interferes with fine motor control, including voice control, singing in key may reveal self-confidence, status, and extroversion. Rhythm may reveal the brain's capacity for sequencing complex movements reliably, and the efficiency and flexibility of the brain's "central pattern generators". Likewise, virtuosic performance of instrumental music may reveal motor coordination, capacity for automating complex learned behaviors, and having the time to practice (which in turn indicates not having heavy parental responsibilities already, and hence sexual availability). Melodic creativity may reveal learning ability to master existing musical styles and social intelligence to go beyond them in producing optimally exciting novelty.
And music as a sexual adaptation also explains why music has developed so far and so fast. Sexual selection tends to lead to runaway development. If peahens tend to prefer peacocks with longer tails, and there is variation in tale length among males, the longer tailed males will mate more often and their genes will gradually come to dominate the population. And as they do, males will grow longer and longer tails until the benefits of sexual selection are outweighed by the survival handicap that large tails represents. Applied to music, Miller notes that,
As Darwin realized, music's aesthetic and emotional power, far from indicating a transcendental origin, point to a sexual-selection origin, where too much is never enough. Our ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, "OK, our music's good enough, we can stop now", because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric-Claptons, hominid-Jerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons. The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection's arms race to impress minds like ours.
Well, I'm impressed. But there is still much to do in unravelling the mystery that is music.
I'd like to thank Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Dave Brubeck for their assistance in the composition of this article.
The books mentioned in the article are all available from Amazon.com:
—The mirror of laughter
If you hear people laughing, even if you cannot hear what they are laughing about, the premotor cortical region of the brain prepares your facial muscles to join in. It's well known that laughter is contagious, and provides a way of mirroring the behavior of others and thus strengthening social bonds. Laughter is one of those social behaviors (laughter almost always occurs in a social setting—unless I'm reading P.G. Wodehouse by myself) we share with our chimpanzee cousins, and it is thought that laughter may have been a precursor to language.
—Why do men have deeper voices than women?
[deep voice] Hey, babe. Haven't I seen you somewhere before? [/deep voice] I know; it never worked for me, either. But recent research indicates that women find a deep voice attractive in a man. This is probably because, like other indicators of male sexual maturity—like broad shoulders and facial hair—it is the result of testosterone at puberty. A deep voice advertises that the speaker is sexually mature. As for men, pinpointing what is attractive in a woman's voice is difficult. They know it when they hear it, but nobody has been able to identify the components.—Teenagers do the stupidest things
Teenagers do many stupid things: they drive fast, eat fatty and sugary foods to excess, smoke, drink and drive or ride with drunk drivers, have unprotected sex, etc. But why? Well, two reasons, it appears. The first is that, while you and I have calculated the cost/benefit ratio for many of these behaviors many times and now don't bother with the calculation because we know the answer, teens have to work their way through that calculation. And second, when it comes to costs and benefits, they appear to over-estimate the benefits relative to the costs. And teens do this while over-estimating the risks. You and I know the benefits are often transient while those costs can haunt you for a long time, but teens still have to learn that. However, they do seem to have more fun than I do these days.
—Altruism and group selection
The existence of altruism has been a problem for evolutionists ever since Darwin sat down one afternoon to write a book. Altruism makes sense as kin selection, because your sacrifice in favor of those who carry copies of your genes helps preserve those genes. But we see plenty of altruism that benefits strangers. How did that come about? Many who have approached this question have opted for some form of group selection: altruism benefits the group and makes that group more likely to supplant more selfish groups. The problem with group selection has always been that it is easily undermined by individual selfishness. If everyone else is making sacrifices and harming their own fitness, and I can avoid making such sacrifices, I will benefit and leave more copies of my genes. Selfishness will successfully invade altruism. But now Samuel Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has found a way to improve the viability of group selection for altruism. Studying modern hunter-gatherer people, who are thought to live in the same way as our ancestors, Bowles discovered that hunter-gatherers in a band were much more closely related than had previously been thought. This, along with customs such as monogamy and food sharing, made have provided the necessary conditions which allowed altruistic tribes to expand at the expense of those less altruistic. It is interesting research and it has made the spread of altruism through group selection at least plausible.
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Copyright 2007 The Bio-Rational Institute
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