12/31/06
Before becoming a cognitive psychologist with music on his brain, David Levitin turned to producing in the popular music biz because of the chicks. Now, researching the neurology of music appreciation, he comes up with a survivability/reproductive angle on music:
Not all of Dr. Levitin’s idea have been easily accepted. He argues, for example, that music is an evolutionary adaptation: something that men developed as a way to demonstrate reproductive fitness. (Before you laugh, consider the sex lives of today’s male rock stars.) Music also helped social groups cohere. “Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago,” he said.
But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense of evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker has called music “auditory cheesecake,” something pleasant but not evolutionarily nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then why, Dr. Pinker asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical music when she’s alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote an entire chapter refuting Dr. Pinker’s arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Levitin’s book he said he hadn’t read it.
The article's author should have asked Geoffrey Miller what he thinks. Skip Pinker. Miller, in The Mating Mind, argued that things like musical proficiency and even intelligence were selected for by females in the mating game. That is, females prefer males who are smarter and more musical (and, maybe, can dance) to men who cannot. Why?
Could be many reasons, some related to adaptability and hence a good indicator that they'd provide for little ones (a typically female interest), but (I suspect) more because they just like it. Males are more interesting to be around when they have interests. Women can get bored with female company, doing the same-old/same-old. Men surprise them. That's good. That's sexy.
It all comes down to aesthetics, perhaps. Our hominid ancestors saw sparks of something in the smarter males and females, and chose to engage in sex with those smarter ones. And over time those sparks proved to have amazing secondary effects. Intelligence is fun, yes; amusing. But it also comes in handy when you have to concoct a whole new way of life in a whole new environment, or deal with new groups of foreigners, such as the Neanderthals that inhabited the regions just outside of Africa, when our hominid ancestors made their big move into Eurasia.
Hey: maybe it was our singing that impressed the Neanderthals to let us pass! They had big brains. But could they sing? Maybe all they could do is whistle. So, just out of Africa, two homind groups had a hootenanny, with stomping, singing, and whistling, and after midnight our ancestors killed all the Neanderthals, stole their food, and went on.
I go out on a limb here, simply to limn the speculative nature of this science. We are all stuck with conjectures, most of the time, when it comes to our natural history.
The thing that disturbs me about Evolutionary Psychology, as currently practiced, is not that is dares speculate, but that so many of the reasons
trotted out for this and that are too tightly integrated as reasons. Evolution, in its unfoldings and involutions, depends for a lot of its successes on loose connections and coincidence, on things like unintended consequences.
The way Levitin's EP explanation is worded, in the article, strikes me as evidence of too tight a theory. Men do not choose to be obsessed with causality or music or categorizations (things male intelligence are especially good at) just so they can get women. They do so because they are intelligent, and the women find that attractive.
Of course, some guys will emulate behavior that is reproductively (meaning, reallly: sexually) efficient.
Memories of high school come flowing back. The boys successful in sports got a lot of attention, and were sexual magnets. True. ut it amazed me how much attention I got, too, just for seeming smarter than the rest. I had about a dozen girls having crushes on me, and I was in a small school. I was not trying to be a sexual magnet. I checked my interest in girls until age 16. But still!
My interest in music, in literature, in the sciences, in philosophy, was not at all driven by expectation of evolutionary advantage. That Pinker would think this a detriment to the evolutionary significance of this strikes me as a very, very limiting test. Reading the books of his I have read, I am a little surprised that he has such a crude and simple model of the development of evolutionary advantage.
He should study economics for a few years, with the Austrians.
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