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Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Origins of Music

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.07.006Get rights and content

Humans devote ample time to produce and perceive music. How and why this behavioral propensity originated in our species is unknown. For centuries, speculation dominated the study of the evolutionary origins of musicality. Following Darwin’s early intuitions, recent empirical research is opening a new chapter to tackle this mystery.

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Darwin’s Early Intuitions

Darwinian thought applied to understanding how music originated in humans has a conflicted history. Darwin originally proposed to apply his sexual selection framework to music [1]. However, except for a few theoretical perspectives acknowledging his contribution [2], it was commonly assumed that Darwin had little to say about music, and music research little to benefit from a Darwinian approach [1]. Recently, empirical research has tested Darwin’s intuitions laid out as hypotheses almost two

Old Hypotheses and New Empirical Work

Traditionally, hypotheses for the evolution of human musicality focused on one overarching question: why is music such a widespread behavior in our species if it does not seem to have an obvious adaptive function? For more than a century, the role of sexual selection in human musicality has been addressed from purely theoretical and anecdotal perspectives. By contrast, the past decade has seen a number of empirical, complementary efforts to test whether musicality could be a sexually selected

Breaking Down the Evolution of Musicality into Individually Testable Hypotheses

The plurality of these empirical approaches and results suggests that the evolution of musicality should be broken down into individually testable subhypotheses (H1–4 in Table 1), which can be tested to probe the sexual selection framework. How do the empirical studies described above address the hypotheses in Table 1? There is ample evidence for H1: a number of genes are associated with, among other things, musical aptitude, creativity, perception, and production 4, 5. There is also some

A Complex Picture: Mixed Support for Sexual Selection on Human Musicality

Together, these works provide a multifaceted picture: some data support while other data refute the role of sexual selection in human musicality; possibly because this evolutionary framework is more complex than usually surmised. Some caveats apply, which can inform and refine future research. First, sexual selection already displays nuances when applied to model organisms whose ethogram is well known (e.g., Drosophila). Applying sexual selection to early stages of human evolution is even

Human Sensory Biases and Alternative Evolutionary Hypotheses

A possible solution to this riddle could be offered by the biological framework of sensory biases 2, 10. This framework suggests that not all traits and perceptual preferences are amenable to selective pressures. Preference for some patterns is a mere byproduct of sensory biases, and production of specific patterns is a way of exploiting those biases. In particular, the idea from avian vision that evolution can be driven by esthetics, rather than functionality [10], is readily extendable to

A Multicomponent Approach to Empirically Test the Origins of Human Musicality

In brief, it remains unclear whether sexual selection might have shaped musicality in our ancestors 3, 8, 9. What appears clear is that several strands of research are starting to actively test evolutionary hypotheses empirically. Armchair speculation is finally turning into data-driven debate. Methods used include comparative experiments on precursors to musicality in other species (Box 2), genetics of human populations, and paleo-anthropology reconstructing early hominid behavior. An

Acknowledgments

The author is sincerely grateful to Ben Charlton, Cinzia Chiandetti, Piera Filippi, Tecumseh Fitch, Maxime Garcia, Irma Järvelä, Massimo Lumaca, Guy Madison, Margarita Mendez Arostegui, Alessandro Miani, John O’Connor, Ruth Sonnweber, Charlie Stuijt, the editor, and two anonymous referees for invaluable comments on earlier manuscript versions of this paper. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie

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