0.7 Music, biological evolution, and the brain  (Page 3/30)

A final conceptual point about TTM theory concerning the fundamental question of why humans are drawn to musical behaviors merits discussion here. TTM theory claims that music can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain systems, but it does not propose that humans engage in music in order to produce these effects. Rather, as discussed in section 6 below, TTM theory posits that people are drawn to music because of its emotional power and because of its efficacy for ritual and memory. The lasting effects on nonmusical abilities are thus a consequence of how music engages the brain, not a cause of musical behavior. A better understanding of how and why these effects occur is of interest both for basic brain science and for designing musical activities to address problems in nonmusical domains, i.e., in scientifically-based music therapy (Leins et al., 2009).

2. the evolutionary puzzle of music

Like language, music is a human universal that reaches deep into our species’ past (Nettl, 2000). Recent excavations have revealed bone flutes dating to the late Pleistocene era (~40,000 ybp, Conard et al., 2009). Cross-cultural and developmental research indicates that listening to and/or making music has a profound appeal to most members of our species, starting early in life (Blacking, 1973; Trehub, 2003). Thus, one can predict with some confidence that the few remaining uncontacted tribes of humans, when finally described by anthropologists, will have music as part of their behavioral repertoire.

For those interested in the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, such observations are puzzling. Musical activities lack any obvious survival value. Why then is music so pervasive in human life? Are we musical today because music helped our ancestors survive? Has the human mind been shaped by natural selection for music? Darwin (1871) was the first to wrestle with these questions, noting that “as neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (p. 1207).

In The Descent of Man , Darwin offered an adaptationist theory of music’s origins based on principles of sexual selection (see Kivy, 1959, for a discussion of these ideas in a larger historical framework). For the next century, scholarly discussion of music and evolution was relatively sparse but began to stir again with the rise of cognitive studies of music (e.g., Roederer, 1984). Interest in the topic has grown considerably in the past decade, reflecting the explosion of cognitive neuroscience research on music (Peretz, 2006). Indeed, since 2000, two scientific volumes of essays have been devoted to the evolution of music (Wallin et al., 2000; Vitouch and Ladinig, 2009), and the topic has been addressed in many other books and scholarly articles (e.g., Pinker 1997; Hauser and McDermott, 2003; Mithen 2005; Fitch, 2006, 2010; Hagen and Hammerstein, 2009; Kirschner and Tomasello, in press). Several adaptationist and nonadaptationist proposals are now in existence; some of the more prominent ones are reviewed below.