These notes are in response to the last chapter of Dan Levitin’s book, This Is Your Brain on Music. It seems that Steven Pinker asserted, in his 1997 keynote presentation to the Society for Music Perception and Cognition conference, that music seems to be an evolutionary artifact, that there is no obvious adaptational value for its cognitive participation (indeed, Pinker suggests that music is “auditory cheesecake”: tasty, but non-nutritious, adaptationally speaking. Levitin disagrees, though he notes that anyone with Pinker’s stature as a scientist needs to be listened to seriously. In Levitin’s view, music (especially the part of music we call “dance”) could well be an element of sexual selection, much like peacock’s tail and the stag’s antlers: They may not, in themselves, demonstrate anything overtly adaptive, but they do show a more generalized cognitive ability, which would, presumably, confer greater overall fitness.

Still, I am guessing that many working in the field will not be satisfied with this. It is natural, I think, for a researcher to consider his or her own field from a defensive viewpoint. Nonetheless, I agree with Levitin’s contention that music must be adaptive in the Darwinian sense, perhaps through sexual selection (which was, after all, an important component of Darwin’s scheme), perhaps preceding the development of language. Please note, however, that I do not say this from that defensive stance: I love music, and I love language. Even more, I love discovery. Howbeit, I am convinced that regardless of how the issue of adaptational primacy is settled, Pinker’s view, while admirably provocative, cannot really be sustained in light of several lines of research and thought. (Nor, in my view, does this make any difference; more about this later.)

Levitin’s point that sexual selection is likely at work is very well taken, though it is important to note that, unlike with much of the animal kingdom, this cuts both ways, gender-wise, in humans.

(My own youth attests to this: I was always attracted to musicians, and I eventually married a violist. As to the early stages of sexual exploration, playing in the band was, like competing in the debate club, a perfect alternate path to social success, or at least medium-okay esteem. We nerdish geeks were entirely non-competitive against the jocks and popular super-stars, but in our small pond, we could still preen: By going to All-State we could still show the opposite sex that we had, at least in some areas, what it took.

(Even better, of course, was to play dance dates—preferably at other schools where we could strut without, presumably, our parochial lack of stud-cred proactively damning our modus operandi, Best of all was to join a regional orchestra. While the jocks were strictly local, our social circles could be relatively cosmopolitan—itself something of a turn-on, especially as we needed to drive long distances, away from direct parental influences—tapping the cognitively best from a wide (albeit shallow) social milieu.

(The only problem was that, at the end of the day, or evening, we were still just competent geeks. I remember, with some minor pain to this day, the Dear Al: “You are the kind of guy I would eventually like to marry, but for now, I just want to have fun.” Can we say, I in essence thought, though the term was still many years in the future, “Evolutionary Psychology 101?”)

One enduring mystery of human evolution is why the neocortical regions of the brain grew so fast. Random mutations cannot account, most evolution theorists assert, for the required evolutionary speed; what propelled that development? Sexual selection provides a reasonable candidate explanation, as it is known that top-down mechanisms (which is what aesthetic processes such as sexual selection are all about!) can greatly facilitate and catalyze environmental tracking. True, unless they are well-constrained, top-down paradigms come with a whiff of teleology, a definite taboo in the culture of evolution theory—the blind watchmaker and all that. (Cultural evolution is, by the way, also very much top-down, at least from the genome’s perspective.) Nevertheless, a good case can be made, I feel, that sexual selection is a likely contributor to rapid cortex development, and that music is a positive marker for that process. After all, we know that, regardless of whether music is adaptive in the same as language, it does require prodigious cognitive skills. And some kinds of “aesthetic sense” are found in other species whose beginnings are much older than human language development. (Whether or not music as we know it predates human language, and whether or not it exists in other species, emotion and ritual certainly do; too, both are, in fact, inseparable from human musical forms.)

My own feeling is that language and music are only recently differentiated, cognitively and neurologically speaking, both scaffolding upon earlier mechanisms. Further, much of the modern brain’s evolutionary development, I conjecture, is due to these incipient skills (along with a few others) competing for neurological resources and cognitive primacy. That is, they have co-evolved. A putative arms race notwithstanding, I maintain that cognition, like every other complex system, performs best (and most robustly) as a “community”, or, to use William James’ term, an “ensemble” of modules, which would again suggest co-evolution: What good is a king without a working kingdom? Also, music may just be a really good cognitive neighbor (and not just to language; think, for instance, what expertise in counterpoint could buy you).

Withal, what if Pinker is right? What if music is just a “spandrel”, an evolutionary artifact? So what, indeed: What could this possibly mean to the modern brain (or the hunter-gatherer brain of 50K years ago)? I say, “not much” (nor does it suggest a validity to the “auditory cheesecake” image), and my thesis comes, in large part, from Darwin himself in his discussion of conversion of function. Any evolutionary development, whether directly adaptational or artifactual is, truly, “accidental”. (So is, in the literal sense, all bottom-up natural selection.) Thus it can be pounced upon by the exigencies of tracking. After all, genetic mutations are themselves artifacts of a variation process, and higher-order artifacts are precisely higher-order variations (aka exaptations, to use Gould’s neologism) subject to the pressures of natural selection!

We can take this further. A “folk axiom” in biology (“folk”, because most everyone believes it to exemplify some basic truth even though it is not stated formally) says that whenever there a a large reservoir of a resource, some life form will evolve to exploit it. To this, I add a couple of conditions: There must be a reliable source of energy; so, too, a generator of variation. When we put these together—a resource pool, a source of variation, and a way to power the machine—we are pretty much describing the chain of life. Moreover, the process can be taken as a metaphor that dramatically widens the very definition of life, since “resource” can be just about anything: money, political gullibility, vestigial cognitive quirks like jealousy and professional envy, noxious weeds (think tobacco), craving of excitement, blood-lust, economic hopes, hedonistic gratification...whatever. When we add in the generation of exaptation to provide variability the recursive feedback that inevitably attends all turbulent systems (i.e., emergent phenomena)....Well, that is another discussion

What is an artifact” What is artifactual? I argue that everything that becomes adaptive per Darwin began its career an an “accident”. Is play adaptive? It surely is now, and is, apparently, a universal for at least most terrestrial vertebrates. How about modern science? Well, not to our ancestral genome, at least, or it would have been so encoded. Yet it is surely useful these days, though—for now—its vectors are social and cultural, not genetic. Religion? Politics? I think a good case (though, perhaps not a definitive one) can be made that both predate language—and even the human species (cf. Frans de Waal). Whatever the case, unlike academic cognitive psychology (and linguistics), both are human universals.

However, then, music started out, it, in its various forms, is almost certainly an integral part of the “modern” brain’s firmware (or “wetware”). This, of course, can also be inferred from a perusal of Donald Brown’s list of human universals. My feeling is that, since the cognitive community has coexisted successfully for a long time, coming to grips, as it were, with its diversity, music now (usually) complements, rather than competes with language. (Hey, they both have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with the outside world.) But how, exactly, this construction may act to build the holistic mind is a subject for another day.

(See also http://www.amc-music.com/news/articles/mystery.htm for an overview of news articles on the controversy.)