Unknown comments on The Gift We Give To Tomorrow - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 July 2008 06:07AM

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Comment author: Elliot_Temple 18 July 2008 02:59:35AM -1 points [-]

Leonid,

Once hunting music was created, females could select mates not just by how well they hunted directly (which they often didn't directly observe), but also by the quality of their hunting music. A man's hunting music provided extra information about his knowledge of hunting. Once females started selecting mates partially in this way, there was evolutionary selection pressure on men to start making music for the purpose of attracting a mate.

Female taste in music did not correspond to hunting music absolutely perfectly; it was just flawed rules of thumb. This left room for males to deviate from only making sounds to mimic the hunt. So males started competing with each other to make music that best attracted females, at the cost of making it less like hunting. Once males started doing this, females started selecting the males that were best at competing with the other males, rather than the males with the music that sounded most like hunting. So music became a useless display (useless for survival) used in sexual selection, like the peacock's tail. Musical development after that point didn't have anything to do with hunting, which is why the origins aren't obvious today.

How's that?