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Another version of the social cohesion hypothesis is notable for the relatively small degree of biological specialization for music that it proposes (Kirschner and Tomasello, in press). According to this view, music originated as an invention in ancestral human groups. Because music promoted group cohesion and survival, it acted as a cultural (vs. biological) adaptation, so that musically-oriented groups outsurvived other groups. Subsequently, due to feedback between cultural group selection and biological natural selection, there was selection for individuals who were biologically predisposed toward musical behavior. See Richerson and Boyd, 2005, Ch. 6, for a general discussion of gene-culture coevolution in the context of human cooperative behavior. Thus, according to Kirschner and Tomasello, modern humans are hypothesized to have “an innate proclivity for musical sounds and actions” without necessarily having any other brain specializations for music processing (cf. Trehub and Hannon, 2006). The foregoing discussion of several adaptationist theories is necessarily brief, and readers desiring a wider and deeper discussion of adaptationist ideas are referred to the primary literature cited above.

For the sake of brevity, a critique of the above theories is not provided here (the interested reader is referred to Patel, 2008: 368-371). For the current purposes, the relevant point is that all despite their different points of emphasis, all adaptationist proposals view the human mind as having been specifically shaped by evolution to support musical behavior.

2.2 nonadaptationist proposals

In sharp contrast to adaptationist theories, nonadaptationist theories of music posit that there has been no natural selection for musical abilities in our species. Herbert Spencer implicitly took this position (even prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species ) in his essay, “On the origin and function of music” (Spencer, 1857). Spencer argued that music grew out of the rhythms and cadences of impassioned speech and launched a debate that engaged Darwin and many other scholars (for a fascinating discussion, see Kivy, 1960, 1964, and Rehding, 2000).

Some thirty years later, William James voiced a nonadaptationist view of music in The Principles of Psychology (1890). James regarded the human love of music as “a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system” (Vol. 2, p. 419) and asserted: “It has no zoological utility…it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ…it has entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather [has] not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house” (Vol. 2, p. 627).

A modern descendant of James’ view is that of Pinker (1997: 528-538), which has become the most prominent nonadaptationist theory of music. Pinker’s proposal starts with the theory that many human mental faculties have been direct targets of natural selection. Music is chosen as a counterexample and is argued to be a human invention that is universal because of its link to pleasure: “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” (p. 528). In a later essay, Pinker (2007) elaborates this point to propose that music and many other human arts are “by-products of two other traits: motivational systems that give us pleasure when we experience signals that correlate with adaptive outcomes…and the technological know-how to create purified doses of these signals…” (p. 171).

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Source:  OpenStax, Emerging disciplines: shaping new fields of scholarly inquiry in and beyond the humanities. OpenStax CNX. May 13, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11201/1.1
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