How Did Music Evolve? (Creator, Darwin, birth control, choice, evolution)

[Sunstone]

How did musical ability evolve in humans?

Musical ability seems to have no advantages for survival, so how would natural selection select for the ability?

But is this an example of sexual selection (as opposed to natural selection). What makes me wonder is the plain fact that many women are attracted to male singers and musicians. Think groupies. So, perhaps, women are responsible for musical ability in humans by mating with men who had some talent for it.

What do you think?

[cardero]

Sunstone writes: How did musical ability evolve in humans?

There is a short animated feature on the Walt Disney Fantasia 2000 DVD entitled “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” that covers the explanation thoroughly.

Sunstone writes: Musical ability seems to have no advantages for survival, so how would natural selection select for the ability?

Music makes no exception to gender, race creed or color. Anyone can play an instrument or make natural sounds to form music. If you are good at it you can make a living with it (Bobby McFerrin comes to mind).

Sunstone writes: But is this an example of sexual selection (as opposed to natural selection). What makes me wonder is the plain fact that many women are attracted to male singers and musicians. Think groupies. So, perhaps, women are responsible for musical ability in humans by mating with men who had some talent for it.

Not in every case. A bass player does not become a bass player because he is assured to collect his share of groupies.

[Popeyesays]

Originally Posted by Sunstone

How did musical ability evolve in humans?

Musical ability seems to have no advantages for survival, so how would natural selection select for the ability?

But is this an example of sexual selection (as opposed to natural selection). What makes me wonder is the plain fact that many women are attracted to male singers and musicians. Think groupies. So, perhaps, women are responsible for musical ability in humans by mating with men who had some talent for it.

What do you think?

I think all the arts developed along with language. For music in particular, this is true. Language creates rhythyms and pitch - rhythyms and pitch lead to harmony in several voices. If you twang a bit of sinew its not long before you arrange bits of sinew so they "twang" melodically. The wind operating a bull roarer creates pitch, and its not a big step to a flute from a bull roarer or diggery-doo.

We can see art in VERY early neolithic culture.

As to a survival trait -well, art is a social thing. ANY social development reinforces social adhesion and that is a BIG, BIG survival trait. Social adhesion leads to more efficient hunting and gathering, more efficient means of technology and specialization.

So music is a positive survival mechanism after all.

Regards,
Scott

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by Popeyesays

I think all the arts developed along with language. For music in particular, this is true. Language creates rhythyms and pitch - rhythyms and pitch lead to harmony in several voices. If you twang a bit of sinew its not long before you arrange bits of sinew so they "twang" melodically. The wind operating a bull roarer creates pitch, and its not a big step to a flute from a bull roarer or diggery-doo.

I agree that musical ability has a precursor behavior in language.

As to a survival trait -well, art is a social thing. ANY social development reinforces social adhesion and that is a BIG, BIG survival trait. Social adhesion leads to more efficient hunting and gathering, more efficient means of technology and specialization.

So music is a positive survival mechanism after all.

I'm not sure I see as close of a link between social adhesion caused by music and more efficient hunting and gathering as you do. I still feel that sexual selection, rather than natural selection, played a decisive role in the evolution of musical ability.

[michel]

Darwin had some thought on this; I have only pasted a short extract.........
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/music.htm

In The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex, Darwin (1871) devoted ten pages to bird song and six pages to human music, viewing both as outcomes of an evolutionary process called sexual selection. Darwin’s idea that most bird song functions as a courtship display to attract sexual mates has been fully supported by biological research (e.g. Catchpole & Slater, 1995), but his idea that human music evolved to serve the same function have been strangely neglected. Although there has been much written about the origins of human music (e.g. Blacking, 1987; Dissanayake, 1988, 1992; Knight, 1991; Rousseau, 1966; Storr, 1992; Tiger, 1992), very few theorists have taken a serious adaptationist approach to the question. Those who have, have usually searched in vain for music’s survival benefits for the individual or the group, overlooking Darwin’s compelling argument that music’s benefits were primarily reproductive, and best explained by the same sexual selection processes that shaped bird song. This chapter has the simple goal of reviving Darwin’s original suggestions that human music must be studied as a biological adaptation, and that music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display to attract sexual partners. Fortunately, after a century of obscurity, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection itself has already undergone a renaissance in biology over the last two decades, so biology offers many new insights about courtship adaptations, which will be applied here to human music.


The historical analogy between the study of bird song and the study of human music may prove instructive. Before Darwin, the natural theologians such as William Paley considered bird song to have no possible function for the animals themselves, but rather to signal the creator’s benevolence to human worshippers through miracles of beauty. Bird song was put in the category of the natural sublime, along with flowers, sunsets, and alpine peaks, as phenomena with an aesthetic impact too deep to carry anything less than a transcendental message. The idea that bird song would be of any use to birds was quite alien before about 1800. With the rise of natural history, writers such as Daines Barrington in 1773 and Gilbert White in 1825 (cited in Darwin, 1871) argued that bird song must have some function for the animals that use it, but must arise exclusively from male rivalry and territorial competition. They recognized that male birds sing much more than females, and sing mostly in breeding season. But they insisted that song was a form of vocal intimidation between males rather than attraction between the sexes. Darwin agreed that some songs function to intimidate, but argued that female choice for male singing ability was the principal factor in the evolution of bird song: “The true song, however, of most birds and various strange cries are chiefly uttered during the breeding-season, and serve as a charm, or merely as a call-note, to the other sex” (Darwin, 1871, p. 705). Against the hypothesis that bird song somehow aids survival, Darwin cited observations that male birds sometimes drop dead from exhaustion while singing during the breeding season. His sexual selection theory was perfectly concordant with the idea that males sacrifice their very lives in the pursuit of mates, so that their attractive traits live on in their offspring.



The history of theorizing about the evolution of human music shows many of the same themes. Many commentators have taken Paley’s creationist, transcendental position, claiming that music’s aesthetic and emotional power exceed what would be required for any conceivable biological function. Claude Levi-Strauss (1970, p. 18), for example, took a position typical of cultural anthropology in writing “Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.” Where such commentators have recognized any need for consistency with evolutionary principles, they usually explain music as side-effect of having a big brain, being conscious, or learning culture. As we shall see, none of these explanations are adequate if music can be shown to be a legitimate adaptation in its own right. Other theorists have adopted the pre-Darwinian natural historians’ rather narrow view of biological function as centered on competition for survival. This has led to desperate searches for music’s contribution to pragmatic survival problems in Pleistocene Africa, our ancestral environment. Here, quandaries arise. No one has ever proposed a reasonable survival benefit to individuals taking the time and energy to produce music, which has no utility in finding food, avoiding predators, or overcoming parasites. But if one falls back on claiming survival benefits to the group, through some musical mechanism of group-bonding, then one ends up in the embarrassing position of invoking group selection, which has never been needed to explain any other trait in any mammalian species (see Williams, 1966). If evolution did operate according to survival of the fittest, human music would be inexplicable.


Consider Jimi Hendrix, for example. This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination. His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts, did him no survival favours. But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more. Hendrix’s genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation, through the power of attracting opposite-sex admirers. 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.



Darwin on human music



Though Darwin devoted only a few pages of The descent of man to the role of sexual selection in the evolution of human music (Darwin, 1871, pp. 875-881), his insights remain so apposite that they are worth reviewing here. Darwin seems to have considered music the single best example of mate choice having shaped a human behavioral trait. He first sets the context by reminding the reader that sounds generally evolve for reproductive functions: “Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species” (Darwin, 1871, p. 875). He reviews as examples the sounds of frogs, toads, tortoises alligators, birds, mice, and gibbons, which are produced only in the breeding season, usually only by males, but sometimes by both sexes. He then reviews the anatomy of sound perception to argue that the capacity to perceive musical notes could easily have begun as a side-effect of the capacity to distinguish noises in general: “an ear capable of discriminating noises -- and the high importance of this power to all animals is admitted by every one -- must be sensitive to musical notes” (Darwin, 1871, p. 877). The famous 1868 paper by Helmholtz on acoustic physiology is cited to explain why many animals would converge on using tones that belong to human musical scales. Darwin concludes with a strong critique of the natural theology position, arguing that if male birds sing to females, it must be because female birds are impressed by singing: “unless females were able to appreciate such sounds and were excited or charmed by them, the persevering efforts of the males, and the complex structures often possessed by them alone, would be useless; and this is impossible to believe” (Darwin, 1871, p. 878

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

The greatest contribution music has made to evolution is in the evolving dinner bell. The call to dinner and meat on the table has been adapted to the ring tone on cell phones. After dinner chamber music grew out of the need for proper digestion .

http://www.amazingeveolutionfacts.cpu/music/