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"Evolution of human music through sexual selection"

Started by butnut, February 05, 2005, 04:52:45 PM

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butnut

I found this (long) article, and thought that other people might be interested in it:

http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/music.htm

It's far too long to quote in full, but I'll rip out a few bits that I found of particular interest:

QuoteDarwin agreed that some songs function to intimidate, but argued that female choice for male singing ability was the principal factor in the evolution of bird song: "The true song, however, of most birds and various strange cries are chiefly uttered during the breeding-season, and serve as a charm, or merely as a call-note, to the other sex" (Darwin, 1871, p. 705).  Against the hypothesis that bird song somehow aids survival, Darwin cited observations that male birds sometimes drop dead from exhaustion while singing during the breeding season.  His sexual selection theory was perfectly concordant with the idea that males sacrifice their very lives in the pursuit of mates, so that their attractive traits live on in their offspring. 

QuoteNo one has ever proposed a reasonable survival benefit to individuals taking the time and energy to produce music, which has no utility in finding food, avoiding predators, or overcoming parasites.  But if one falls back on claiming survival benefits to the group, through some musical mechanism of group-bonding, then one ends up in the embarrassing position of invoking group selection, which has never been needed to explain any other trait in any mammalian species (see Williams, 1966).  If evolution did operate according to survival of the fittest, human music would be inexplicable. 

Consider Jimi Hendrix, for example.  This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination.  His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts,  did him no survival favours.  But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden.  Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.  Hendrix's genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation, through the power of attracting opposite-sex admirers. As Darwin realized, music's aesthetic and emotional power, far from indicating a transcendental origin, point to a sexual-selection origin, where too much is never enough.  Our ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, "OK, our music's good enough, we can stop now", because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric-Claptons, hominid-Jerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons.  The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection's arms race to impress minds like ours.

QuoteMost animal signal systems have been successfully analyzed as adaptations that manipulate the signal receiver's behavior to the signaller's benefit.   Signals are usually selfish.  If we take an adaptationist approach to music, and if music is not just directed at kin, then we must analyze music as a biological signal that manipulates receivers to the benefit of signallers.  Many such manipulative signals are sent between species: bee orchids attract male bees by looking and smelling like female bees (Darwin, 1862); warning coloration keeps unpalatable insects from being eaten by their predators (Wallace, 1889).  A few manipulative signals, such as music, are sent primarily within a species, from one conspecific to another.  Such conspecific signals tend to fall into a very small number of categories (Hauser, 1996). There are threats exchanged between competitors, warning calls exchanged between kin (to signal the proximity of a dangerous predator), contact calls exchanged between group members (to keep the group together during movement), dominance and submission signals, and courtship displays.  Of these, courtship displays are almost always much more complex, more varied, more prolonged, more energetically expensive, and more interesting to human observers.  By these criteria, if an alien biologist were asked for their best guess about the evolutionary function of human music as a conspecific signal, they would almost certainly answer: music is a sexually selected courtship display, like almost all other complex, varied, interesting sounds produced by other terrestrial animals.

Music as a courtship adaptation does not mean that music stems from a Freudian sublimated sex drive.  Sexually-selected adaptations do not need to feel very sexy to their users.  A trait shaped by sexual selection does not have to include a little copy of its function inside, in the form of a conscious or subconscious sexual motivation (see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 1992).  The male human beard, although almost certainly an outcome of sexual selection through female mate choice, is not a jungle of hidden, illicit motives.  It simply grows, and displays that its possessor is a sexually mature male, without having any idea why it's doing that.  Even psychological adaptations like music production may work similarly, firing off at the appropriate age and under the right social circumstances, without their possessor having any idea why they suddenly feel "inspired" to learn the guitar and play it where single people congregate.

QuoteAn important twist on the aesthetic display theory is Fisher's (1930) theory of runaway sexual selection.  Fisher considered situations where mate preferences are heritable and courtship traits are heritable, and asked what would happen to both over evolutionary time.  He observed that if peahens varied in the length of tail they prefer, and if peacocks varied in their tail lengths, then they would end up mating assortatively, with the length-obsessed females mating most often with the longest-tailed males. Their offspring would tend to inherit both the genes for the long-tail preference, and the genes for long tails, at above-average frequencies.  If there was an initial bias in the population, with more females preferring long tails than short, and with more females wanting long tails than there are long tails available, then this assortative mating effect would set up a positive-feedback loop between the mate preference and the courtship trait, leading to ever-more-extreme preferences and ever-more-exaggerated traits.  Only when the courtship trait's survival costs became very high might the runaway effect reach an asymptote. Though Fisher's startling idea was rejected for fifty years, it has recently been vindicated by mathematical models (Kirkpatrick, 1982; Pomiankowski et al., 1991).

The power of the runaway theory is that it can explain the extremity of sexual selection's outcomes: how species get caught up in an endless arms race between unfulfillable sexual demands and irresistible sexual displays.  Most relevant for us, the preferences involved need not be cold-blooded assessments of a mate's virtues, but can be deep emotions or lofty cognitions.  Any psychological mechanism used in mate choice is vulnerable to this runaway effect, which makes not only the displays that it favors more extreme, but makes the emotions and cognitions themselves more compelling.  Against the claim that evolution could never explain music's power to emotionally move and spiritually inspire, the runaway theory says: any emotional or spiritual preferences that influence mate choice, no matter how extreme or subjectively overwhelming, are possible outcomes of sexual selection (cf. Dissanayake, 1992).  If music that emotionally moves or spiritually inspires tended to sexually attract as well, over ancestral time, then sexual selection can explain music's appeal at every level.

Indeed, sexual selection during human evolution seems to have led to a division of labor between two major courtship displays, with language displays playing upon receivers' conceptual systems, and music playing upon receivers' emotional systems.  As a tool for activating specific conceptual thoughts in other people's heads, music is very bad and language is very good.  As a tool for activating certain emotional states, however, music is very much better than language.  Combining the two in lyrical music such as love songs is best of all as a courtship display.

QuoteHuman music shows an unusual combination of order and chaos, with some elements highly ritualized and stereotyped, such as tonality, rhythm, pitch transitions, song structure, and musical styles, and other elements highly variable and innovative, such as specific melodies, improvization, and lyrical content.  Hartshorne  (1973, p. 56) has commented "Songs illustrate the aesthetic mean between chaotic irregularity and monotonous regularity".

How could sexual selection favor both in a single display medium?  With a better understanding of indicators and aesthetic displays, we are in a position to answer.

Ritualization means the evolutionary modification of movements and structures to improve their function as signals (Krebs & Davies, 1987).  Ritualization is a typical outcome of signals and displays being under selection to optimally excite the perceptual systems of receivers. Examples of ritualized animal signals include most courtship displays, food-begging displays, warning signals, threat displays, territorial defense displays, play behavior signals, and social grooming behavior.  Ritualizataion results in four typical features: redundancy (repetition over time and over multiple channels), conspicuousness (high intensity, strong contrast), stereotypy (standardized components and units), and alerting components (loud, highly standardized warnings that a more complex signal will follow).  Julian Huxley (1969) has observed that

"The arts involve ritualization or adaptive canalization of the creative imagination ... Creative works of art and literature show ritualization in this extended sense, in being 'adaptively'  (functionally) organized so as to enhance their aesthetic stimulatory effect and their communicatory function.  They differ from all other products of ritualization in each being a unique creation (though they may share a common style, which of course is itself a ritualizing agency)"

Here, Huxley introduces the apparent problem: why do human displays such as music contain so much novelty and creativity if adaptive signals tend to get ritualized?  The problem with completely ritualized signals is that they are boring.  Brains are prediction machines, built to track what's happening in the environment by constructing an internal model of it.  If the senses indicate that the internal model matched external reality, the sensory information hardly even registers on consciousness. Highly repetitive stimuli are not even noticed after a while.  But if the senses detect a mismatch between expectation and reality, attention is activated and consciousness struggles to make sense of the novelty.  Although ritualization makes signals recognizable and comprehensible, novelty and unpredictability makes them interesting.  Adding some unpredictability to signals is the only way to get the signal past the filters of expectation and into a smart animals' conscious attention. 

Thus, sexual selection can often favor novelty in courtship displays. Darwin (1871) observed that in birds, "mere novelty, or slight changes for the sake of change, have sometimes acted on female birds as a charm, like changes of fashion with us".  Large song repertoires, as seen in some bird species like sedge warblers and nightingales, allow birds to produce the appearance of continuous musical novelty (Catchpole, 1987; Podos et al., 1992; Catchpole & Slater, 1995).  Small (1993) has emphasized the importance of neophilia in primate sexual selection: "The only constant interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety.  Although the possibility of choosing for good genes, good fathers, or good friends remains an option open to female primates, they seem to prefer the unexpected".  In humans of course, neophilia is so intense that it drives a substantial proportion of the global economy, particularly the television, film, publishing, news, fashion, travel, pornography, scientific research, psychoactive drug, and music industries.  It seems likely that our hominid ancestors were highly appreciation of novelty, and that this neophilia spilled over into mate choice, where it favored not so much a diversity of sexual partners, but selection of highly creative partners capable of generating continuous behavioral novelty throughout the long years necessary to collaborate on raising children.

The challenge became to convince sexual prospects that you can keep them entertained over long-term relationships, so they don't get bored and incur the maladaptive costs of separation and searching again.  The main way hominids evolved to do this was through language, using linguistic courtship displays to entertain each other and to indicate their intelligence and creativity.  But music could have functioned as another creativity-indicator, and seems to have been sexually selected as such.  As with other indicator hypotheses, this one could be tested by seeing whether capacity for musical improvization and innovation correlates significantly with intelligence and creativity (according to standard psychological measures).

QuoteTo test the more general hypothesis that sexual selection through mate choice has been a major factor in the evolution of human music, we need to see whether music production behavior matches what we would expect for a courtship display.  There is some suggestive evidence in this direction.  I took random samples of over 1800 jazz albums from Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley (1988), over 1500 rock albums from Strong (1991), and over 3800 classical music works from Sadie (1993), and analyzed the age and sex of principal music-producer for each.  The resulting plots indicated that, for each genre, males produced about 10 times as much music as females, and their musical output peaked in young adulthood, around age 30, near the time of peak mating effort and peak mating activity.  This is almost identical to the age and sex profiles discovered by Daly and Wilson (1988) for homicides, which they took as evidence for sexual selection shaping propensities for violence sexual competitiveness.  Here, the same profiles suggest that music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females.  Of course, my samples may be biased, because only the best musicians have opportunities to record albums or have their works documented in classical music encyclopedias.  However, Simonton's (1993) studies of creativity suggest that the demographics of extremely creative cultural production are not significantly different from the demographics of ordinary cultural production, so the former can usually be taken as a proxy for the latter.  If so, it seems likely that most music at all levels, from local pub bands to internationally televised concerts, is produced by young men.   And that is the exactly the pattern sexual selection would produce (see Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Daly & Wilson, 1994).

And finally:

QuoteSexual selection through mate choice is almost unfairly powerful as an evolutionary explanation for things like music that seem impressive and attractive to us, but that seem useless for survival under ancestral conditions.  The reason is that any feature you're even capable of noticing about somebody else (including the most subtle details of their musical genius) is a feature that could have been sexually selected by our ancestors.   If you can perceive the quality, creativity, virtuosity, emotional depth, and spiritual vision of somebody's music, then sexual selection through mate choice can notice it too, because the perceptions of ancestors with minds like yours were literally the agents through which sexual selection operated.  If both musical tastes and musical capacities were genetically heritable (as practically all behavioral traits are -- see Plomin et al., 1997), then runaway sexual selection would have had no trouble in seizing upon early, primitive, acoustic displays and turning them over thousands of generations into a species-wide adaptation known as music.

This chapter has advanced just a few rather obvious ideas about the evolution of music, first articulated by Darwin, but worth reiterating in the light of contemporary biology.  Music is a biological adaptation, universal within our species, distinct from other adaptations, and too complex to have arise except through direct selection for some survival or reproductive benefit.  Since there are no plausible survival benefits for music production, reproductive benefits seem worth a look.  As Darwin emphasized, most complex, creative acoustic displays in nature are outcomes of sexual selection and function as courtship displays to attract sexual partners.  The behavioral demographics of music production are just what we would expect for a sexually-selected trait, with young males greatly over-represented in music-making.  Music shows several features that could function as reliable indicators of fitness, health, and intelligence, and as aesthetic displays that excite our perceptual, cognitive, and emotional sensitivities.  Opportunities for both music production and selective mate choice would have been plentiful under ancestral hunter-gatherer conditions.  In short, the evolutionary analogy between bird song and human music may be much closer than previously believed: both are sexually-selected courtship displays first, and fulfil other functions less directly. 

Now, I find this fascinating. I don't think I've ever properly thought out the evolutionary implications of music. Of course, I was aware it was something common to all cultures, and had read about the Neanderthals' flutes, but had never really got beyond that.

So it this the reason we make music? It's all a big mating ritual, and way of identifying our genetic uniqueness to the opposite sex. Even if we never think of it in these terms (and I've never thought of my music in this way!), it is our genes that make us do it, and over which we have little control.

I liked the bit about ritulization, and how our brains very quickly get bored of the same thing. I think it explains why young teenagers will buy the most basic rubbish pop-shit, because their poor young brains do not know anything else, and why, after a few years, most people move onto more 'developed' music.

The article also raises the question of talent and music, and to what extent music can be 'learned'. It seems to suggest that everyone can paticipate in music to some extent, but that a certain natural apptitude and desire to do it, is needed to become more 'advanced'.

So what do you all think about this? Does it explain why Jimi Hendrix slept with so many women, or was it his enormous cock? And above all, surely it is the ultimate proof of the link between sex and rock and roll - Jimi Hendrix was just the peacock with the biggest tail.

9

Quoteway of identifying our genetic uniqueness to the opposite sex

I haven't read all of that yet, but its very interesting. I suppose music-making is a good way of showing genetic uniqueness.

I keep typing things here and then deleting them. Its really making my brain hurt. I need to sleep on this one...

Rats

Hmmm, velly intelesting. The stuff about groups

But if one falls back on claiming survival benefits to the group, through some musical mechanism of group-bonding, then one ends up in the embarrassing position of invoking group selection, which has never been needed to explain any other trait in any mammalian species

was good, I didn't understand it all but it was a good read, cheers for that.

butnut

Yes, there's lots of it I haven't taken in at all. It's the kind of thing that you need to print out and take notes on. Oh yes, this reminded me of someone:

QuoteThe second common error about group selection is failing to consider free-riding: ways that individuals could enjoy the group benefits without paying the individual costs. 

Bez?

Adrian Brezhnev

Wow, you could write the lyrics for an entire prog-rock album based on all this information.

Or another Alan Parsons project.

Gazeuse

Interesting stuff Butnut!!!

I'm not too sure about the selection of a mate stuff, having nearly driven Mrs. Gaz away by playing her Bartok and ELP when she first came round to my place!!!

The stuff about why males make more music is very interesting. I'd always assumed that it was because males tend to focus on one task and tend to take certain things on to an obsessive extent.

When I was at Uni 20-odd years ago, it was at a time when it was fashionable to try to see men and women as equals in everything and it would be asking for trouble to suggest that men seem to be better at writing music. At the time it was said that womens musical potential was supressed by the males in times gone by and much was made of Clara Schumann's efforts which had to be passed off as Robert's to make them 'palatable.' Fairly scant research however shows that Clara's stuff is shit compared to the Maestro's.

I'm not saying that women can't write music...Plainly many can and quite beautifully, but I'd challenge anyone who tried to suggest that as many women were as good as men, or that as many were driven to...This is an interesting suggestion as to why.

I've also made the point that anyone can write and play music, but only a few can do it repeatedly and to a high standard. Training can improve musical abilities, but a person has to have the initial aptitude for it to do it seriously well.