0.7 Music, biological evolution, and the brain  (Page 4/30)

2.1 adaptationist proposals

The first evolutionary theory for music was offered by Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin drew an analogy with birdsong and theorized that music arose in our ancestors via mechanisms of sexual selection. He wrote: “Musical tones and rhythm were used by the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions” (p. 1209). Darwin speculated that wordless courtship songs predated our linguistic abilities and that such singing provided the scaffolding upon which language itself evolved. This idea of a musical protolanguage has proved of enduring interest to scholars researching the evolution of language and music (e.g., Brown, 2000(a); Mithen, 2005; see Fitch, 2010, for an overview and a recent version of the musical protolanguage theory). Indeed, the idea of a shared origin for language and music is pre-Darwinian, dating at least as far back as French enlightenment writings in the 1700s (Thomas, 1995). Commencing with Darwin, however, scholars have explored the idea within an evolutionary framework, proposing theories for how such a form of communication could have evolved and seeking to explain how it could further evolve into articulate language and fully developed music. Such theories view music as having a biological rather than a purely cultural origin and posit that musical behaviors had survival value for our ancestors.

This section focuses on the three most prominent adaptationist theories of music, based on sexual selection, parental care, and group cohesion. These theories have been proposed and explored independently but are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, musical protolanguage theories often invoke all three such theories to account for the biological origin of musical behavior.

As noted above, the sexual selection theory of music originated with Darwin. Sexual selection has the appeal of being able to explain the evolution of elaborate traits that seem nonadapative, or even maladaptive, in the daily struggle for existence, yet that are beneficial in the competition for mates (the peacock’s tail is a classic example). The sexual selection theory of human music has been explored by Miller (2000) and others and continues to attract interest.

A second set of adaptationist proposals concerns parental care rather than sexual selection. As often noted by biologists, human infants are born remarkably early in their biological development compared to other primates, possibly due to constraints on the size of the birth canal imposed by bipedalism (Mithen, 2005). Dissanayake (2008) and Falk (2004) have pointed to the cross-cultural importance of vocal communication in human infant care, whereby adults use melodious and rhythmic affect-laden utterances (“motherese”) to soothe or arouse prelinguistic infants. Positing that such vocalizations had adaptive value for infant survival, these authors propose that music has its origins in vocalizations aimed at caring for infant offspring.