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3. music as a human invention

Given the debates over the evolutionary status of music, it is parsimonious to adopt the null hypothesis that there has been no natural selection for musical abilities in our species and then ask if there is enough evidence to seriously challenge this null hypothesis. When this strategy is applied to language, there appears to be enough evidence to refute the null hypothesis, as reviewed in Patel (2008: 358-366).

What of music? To some, the universal and ancient nature of human music may imply that it originated as a biological adaptation. The danger of such an assumption is illustrated by another remarkable human trait, namely the control of fire. This trait extends deep into our species’ past and is found in every human culture, yet few would dispute that it arose as an invention rather than a biological adaptation. The universality of the trait can be explained by the fact that it provides things that are universally valued by humans, including the ability to cook food, keep warm, and see in dark places. The example of fire-making teaches us that when we see a universal and ancient human trait, we cannot simply assume that it has been a direct target of natural selection (Patel, 2008: 356). Wrangham (2009) has argued persuasively that the control of fire and the invention of cooking by human ancestors led to co-evolutionary changes in physiology, such that modern humans are now biologically adapted to eating cooked food.  He argues that cooking makes certain animal proteins more digestible and softens food, which reduces the cost of digestion. Consequently, our gut shrank over evolutionary time, allowing valuable metabolic energy to be diverted to our brains, which could then grow larger, since brains are energetically very expensive.  The idea of a human invention leading to co-evolutionary changes in body and brain is an interesting one, though TTM theory does not take this approach when considering the biological impact of music.

It is tempting to think that brain specialization for certain aspects of music cognition (Peretz, 2006) and the existence of genetically-based deficits of music perception (Drayna et al. 2001; Peretz et al., 2007) point to natural selection for music. Yet upon closer examination, these facts provide no compelling support for adaptationist theories. Here, reading and writing provide useful analogies. These are indisputably human inventions, probably no more than about six thousand years old, making them too young to be associated with any evolutionary brain specialization for these abilities. Yet brain imaging studies of literate individuals have shown that certain aspects of reading, e.g., recognizing written characters, are associated with functional specializations in specific brain regions (Dehaene and Cohen, 2007; cf. Stewart et al., 2003). This specialization is clearly a product of experience-dependent neural plasticity, i.e., long-lasting changes in neurons and brain networks driven by experiences within an individual lifetime (Dehaene, 2009). Furthermore, certain reading disorders have a genetic component (Fisher and Franks, 2006), even though one can be confident that humans have not undergone natural selection for reading abilities. That is, specific genes can influence brain circuits that happen to be important for a complex human ability without any implication of natural selection for that ability.

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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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