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komponisto2 comments on The Gift We Give To Tomorrow - Less Wrong
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The book How Music Really Works has some decent ideas about the evolution of music.
On the contrary. That is exactly the sort of rubbish that gives evolutionary psychology such a bad name.
The idea that something like music -- an extremely high-level byproduct of human cognition -- could be explained directly as an evolutionary adaptation is absurd enough. (Imagine trying to give a Darwinian account of why chess pieces move in the way they do.) The invocation of sexual selection -- the process that explains the peacock's fancy tail -- borders on the ludicrous. Sexual selection is only a candidate explanation in cases of marked sexual dimorphism -- a significant phenotypic difference between males and females, as in the peacock. The fact (if true) that professional musicians statistically tend to be males doesn't come anywhere close to cutting it.
The cognitive ability required to appreciate music is quite significant relative to the cognitive ability required to perform music.
The point was, instead, that a (not even demonstrated, remember) statistical correlation is not enough to show that a marked sexual dimorphism was the cause. There's this thing called culture, you see...
My point was that there is no need for sexual dimorphism in the case of sexually selected cognitive performances. And to be clear, music did not evolve specifically for the purpose of courtship display. But anything that tracks fitness will be seized upon by sexual selection, and amplified. It is well acknowledged that sexual selection is very sensitive to initial conditions, a notable one being existing perceptual biases.
Hm, that's pretty reasonable.
I'm wondering why you think this: I don't think it's right. Music seems to be clearly a courtship signal. I'm guessing it was the other way around: it started as a courtship signal and was amplified by other human processes, becoming more than that as human societies developed it.
Hmm you are right. I wasn't sure what I was saying there!
Maybe I meant it was in some significant prototypical form as some byproduct of our auditory processing and etcetera before it was 'captured' and amplified by sexual selection.
It's curious how so much culture can be built upon the contents of courtship displays.
Sexual selection only applies in cases of strong sexual dimorphism? That... isn't what I was taught in high school bio class, nor does it square with my understanding of the dynamics of life. Or, at least, that human dimorphism is sufficiently strong for sexual selection effects to begin kicking in.