Evolution of human music through sexual selection part 2

On the other hand, we mustn’t be dogmatic about group selection always being an unworkable or outdated idea. If music did have individual-level benefits, such as courtship benefits under sexual selection, then it may be possible for group selection to reinforce those individual benefits with group benefits. Under this model of group selection, there would be no necessary tension between the individual and group levels of selection: music would not be “altruistic”, with individual costs and only group benefits. If none of the Ravers were willing to mate with a Wallflower, the Wallflower gene could never invade the group. This type of group selection model has been very poorly studied in theoretical biology, but it is not implausible (see Boyd & Richerson, 1990). I think this sort of interplay between sexual selection and group selection may be the only sensible way to introduce group selection into models of music evolution.

Another overlooked factor is kin selection, which is easy to mistake for group selection when groups are composed largely of genetic relatives. However, to posit that music evolved under kin selection, for some kind of kin-bonding function, seems implausible, because no other species with cooperation between kin requires any special bonding ritual. Nor does music and dance seem to play the major role in family groups that it plays when non-kin come together.

The main appeal of the group-bonding argument is, I think, our subjective experience that music feels better when there are others around enjoying it too. The production of this warm groupish glow, delight, or euphoria should not be mistaken for music’s adaptive function, however. If music evolved principally under sexual selection, it would make sense for music enjoyment to be greater when one is surrounded by a large number of others, especially young, attractive, single others. Rock concerts make teenagers feel giddy with excitement not because they will feel an oceanic oneness with their peers in any behaviorally significant way -- there are too many fights after concerts for that theory to work -- but because concerts afford an excellent opportunity for meeting partners. It is not necessary for us to be aware of this adaptive logic for it to have worked over many millenia in shaping the group production and enjoyment of music. Apart from mating, the experience of producing music in a large group may feel good simply for mood-calibration purposes (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Singing lyrical music together, for example, would have given powerful evidence under ancestral conditions that one was part of a successful band: a large group of healthy, energetic people with few social tensions who share a common language.

Many ethnomusicologists (e.g. Nettl, 1983) take a different view on music’s group-bonding functions, and seem at certain points to view music as a means for collective access to the supernatural. This merits a brief evolutionary critique: accessing the supernatural can only be the adaptive function of a biological trait such as music if the supernatural actually exists, and if accessing it gives concrete fitness benefits. Evolution would not be impressed by animals that merely think they attain god-like powers through music; they would really have to do it for selection to favor this function. Of course, convincing others that there is a supernatural, and that one has special powers to access it, might function as a perfectly good courtship display. Composers who view music as an intermediary between humans and gods (e.g. Stravinsky, 1947) are, of course, setting themselves up for worship as high priests, without taking any vows of celibacy.

A plea for more quantitative behavioral data on music production and reception

As we have seen, evolutionary biology has a rich set of theories concerning sexual selection and animal signal systems, and an ever more sophisticated set of behavioral research methods for testing hypotheses about the functions of animal signal systems such as human music. However, these methods demand much more detailed quantitative data about music production and reception than are typically available from ethnomusicology, psychomusicology, or cultural anthropology. In terms of quantitative data relevant to sexual selection hypotheses, we know more about the calls of the small, drab, neotropical Tungara frog Physalaemus pustulosus (Ryan, 1985), than we do about human music.

There are some key questions that need further research. To test the hypothesis that music production functions in part as a set of sexually-selected indicators, we need to know much more about: (1) the genetic heritability of musical capacities in modern human populations, (2) the genetic heritability of relevant fitness components such displays might indicate, such as intelligence, creativity, aerobic capacity, and motor control, (3) the phenotypic correlations between musical capacities and the underlying traits they represent, (4) the mate preferences people have concerning musical displays, and the inferences they make from manifest musical ability to underlying traits, and (5) the sexual payoffs for different degrees of musicality in tribal and modern populations. To test the hypothesis that music production functions in part as a set of aesthetic displays, we need to know much more about (1) the perceptual and cognitive preferences people (and other apes) have with respect to many dimensions of musical stimuli, (2) the frequency distribution of actual musical productions with respect to those dimensions, (3) whether there is strong assortative mating for musical traits, and (4) whether there are genetic correlations between musical tastes and music-production tendencies in modern populations, which might indicate a runaway effect in progress.

To test the more general hypothesis that sexual selection through mate choice has been a major factor in the evolution of human music, we need to see whether music production behavior matches what we would expect for a courtship display. There is some suggestive evidence in this direction. I took random samples of over 1800 jazz albums from Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley (1988), over 1500 rock albums from Strong (1991), and over 3800 classical music works from Sadie (1993), and analyzed the age and sex of principal music-producer for each. The resulting plots indicated that, for each genre, males produced about 10 times as much music as females, and their musical output peaked in young adulthood, around age 30, near the time of peak mating effort and peak mating activity. This is almost identical to the age and sex profiles discovered by Daly and Wilson (1988) for homicides, which they took as evidence for sexual selection shaping propensities for violence sexual competitiveness. Here, the same profiles suggest that music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females. Of course, my samples may be biased, because only the best musicians have opportunities to record albums or have their works documented in classical music encyclopedias. However, Simonton’s (1993) studies of creativity suggest that the demographics of extremely creative cultural production are not significantly different from the demographics of ordinary cultural production, so the former can usually be taken as a proxy for the latter. If so, it seems likely that most music at all levels, from local pub bands to internationally televised concerts, is produced by young men. And that is the exactly the pattern sexual selection would produce (see Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Daly & Wilson, 1994).

In any case, for evolutionary studies of human music to flourish, we need to adopt the same quantitative methods that have worked so well for studies of signalling systems in other species (Hauser, 1996; Martindale, 1990; Simonton, 1991, 1993). Music must be viewed as a behavior generated by signallers and sent to receivers, rather than as an abstract system of communication, emotion, and cultural meaning. The behavioral details of music production and reception are much more informative about music’s evolutionary origins and adaptive functions than the details of music as a disembodied formal system. Studies of language evolution provide a cautionary tale in this respect: two hundred years of speculation about the origins of human language have shed virtually no light on language’s survival and reproductive payoffs, because language has usually been treated as an abstract system of syntax, morphology, and vocabulary (e.g. Bickerton, 1995; Pinker, 1994), rather than a concrete behavior with some people talking to others in ways that affect their fitness.

Conclusion

“Although ornithologists and acousticians agree about the musicality of the sounds uttered by birds, the gratuitous and unverifiable hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relation between bird song and music is hardly worth discussing” Levi-Strauss (1970, p. 19)

Cultural theorists such as Levi-Strauss have been too quick to dismiss evolutionary analogs of human music. Bird song and human music do not share a common phylogenetic origin, but they may very well share a common adaptive function. This chapter has argued that the functional analogs between human music and animal acoustic courtship have been dismissed too readily, too contemptuously, and with too little appreciation of sexual selection theory.

Sexual selection through mate choice is almost unfairly powerful as an evolutionary explanation for things like music that seem impressive and attractive to us, but that seem useless for survival under ancestral conditions. The reason is that any feature you’re even capable of noticing about somebody else (including the most subtle details of their musical genius) is a feature that could have been sexually selected by our ancestors. If you can perceive the quality, creativity, virtuosity, emotional depth, and spiritual vision of somebody’s music, then sexual selection through mate choice can notice it too, because the perceptions of ancestors with minds like yours were literally the agents through which sexual selection operated. If both musical tastes and musical capacities were genetically heritable (as practically all behavioral traits are -- see Plomin et al., 1997), then runaway sexual selection would have had no trouble in seizing upon early, primitive, acoustic displays and turning them over thousands of generations into a species-wide adaptation known as music.

This chapter has advanced just a few rather obvious ideas about the evolution of music, first articulated by Darwin, but worth reiterating in the light of contemporary biology. Music is a biological adaptation, universal within our species, distinct from other adaptations, and too complex to have arise except through direct selection for some survival or reproductive benefit. Since there are no plausible survival benefits for music production, reproductive benefits seem worth a look. As Darwin emphasized, most complex, creative acoustic displays in nature are outcomes of sexual selection and function as courtship displays to attract sexual partners. The behavioral demographics of music production are just what we would expect for a sexually-selected trait, with young males greatly over-represented in music-making. Music shows several features that could function as reliable indicators of fitness, health, and intelligence, and as aesthetic displays that excite our perceptual, cognitive, and emotional sensitivities. Opportunities for both music production and selective mate choice would have been plentiful under ancestral hunter-gatherer conditions. In short, the evolutionary analogy between bird song and human music may be much closer than previously believed: both are sexually-selected courtship displays first, and fulfil other functions less directly.

There is plenty left to do. We need much more quantitative behavioral data on music production and reception, of many different types, ranging from genetic heritability studies, to physiological studies on the costs of music-playing and dancing, to perceptual experiments on music preferences. There is still the quandary of why individual courtship displays would be produced in groups, and whether group selection may have interacted with sexual selection in music evolution. There is scope for more computer simulations of how musical complexity and novelty might evolve under sexual selection. More centrally, the design features of human music need to be related much more securely and less speculatively to specific functions under ancestral conditions.

Progress concerning music evolution seems most likely by adopting the same adaptationist approach that has proven so fruitful in understanding bird song and other complex signal systems. Modern biology provides a great wealth of evolutionary theory and empirical methods, many of which can be applied with little modification to analyzing human music. To many musicologists, this may seem a radical approach, threatening a psychologically and genetically reductionist view of music. To students of sexual selection, however, to say that a human adaptation has been shaped by mate choice is grant it the least reductionistic, most humane origin, as a part of the mind selected by minds like ours for its ability to provide mental and emotional enjoyment. Music arose as a natural outcome of psychology mixing with sexuality in the genetic stream that became humanity.

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Web reference: http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/new_papers2/miller%202000%20music.DOC

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