--On Saturday, April 21, 2001, 2:37 PM -0400 Arnie Cox
<arnie.cox@oberlin.edu> wrote:
> --On Saturday, April 21, 2001 1:15 PM -0400 jobling@acsu.buffalo.edu
> wrote:
>
>> In this interview, Geoffrey Miller deals with a wide range of topics that
>> have been discussed on this list -- among them, sexual selection and its
>> relationship to the evolution of language and music, and behavior genetic
>> research on intelligence.
>
> Not to be obtuse, but it's not obvious to me what you mean by "deals with"
> the topic of the relationship between sexual selection and music.
> Although what he says seems sensible, I see a fundamental problem that
> undermines the whole discussion. For example, Miller writes:
>
> "Darwin thought the same should apply to human music, that human music
> was largely an outcome of courtship displays. That's a wonderful
> overlooked theory, and it's surprising that people have scrambled for a
> century, coming up with all kinds of silly hypotheses about music
> functioning to make people in a group feel closer to each other and to
> facilitate group cooperation, for example?that's a favorite idea. If you
> go to any nightclub in London or New York or Berlin or Tokyo you can see
> the proper context for understanding music's function. Although it's
> done in groups the point of it is individual display."
>
> Who is on display here? From what he says here and later he seems to be
> speaking of *dance*, not musical performance. If he means dance display,
> where music functions to facilitate dance display, then that's fine (I
> should leave that matter to the dance scholars), but the claim that he's
> explaning something about musical display is not supported by what he
> says.
>
>
> But let's say that Miller meant musical display (playing and/or singing,
> and not dancing). Would anyone be attracted to the musical performances
> of the average person? (I'm assuming that's a fair and reasonable
> question, but I may be overlooking something.) Who among us believes
> that they could use their own musical display to attract a mate? (Of
> course, people can and do use recordings of other people's musical
> displays - a sort of second-order display - both to establish an
> atmosphere and to facilitate dance, but that does not seem to be what
> Miller has in mind.)
>
> In another post, Ian writes:
>
>> It has always been a staple of male sexual wisdom that one of the best
>> ways to get laid is to join a rock band.
>
> Let's say that were true. Does it matter what percentage of males
> actually join rock bands (AND actually get a chance to mate thereby)? I
> would think it does matter, and I would imagine that the percentage in
> both cases is quite small.
>
> (Along a different line: how common is it for mothers to sing to their
> infants, and how might this fit into the picture?)
It is impossible at this point to give exact answers to your many valid
questions. You're asking how exactly musical ability would have affected
rs in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (the hunting-gathering
bands of Pleistocene Africa)? Also, I suggested that traits would be
expected to be adaptive in the middle of their distribution, but you ask,
quite legitimately, wouldn't it be more likely that this trait would lead
to increased rs in people who had higher musical ability on average than
others? I'll just speculate a bit on these two questions. Your
distinction between musical ability and dancing ability seems artificial
and pedantic: after all, how well one dances is dependent on one's
sensitivity to music, isn't it? Like Steve Martin in the old movie _The
Jerk_, if you try to dance without having a sense of rhythm, you aren't
likely to impress potential sexual partners. Given that these two
activities universally accompany each other (see here the remarks about
music in Brown's _Human Universals_), it seems artificial to say that they
should be considered as rigorously separate behaviors. More difficult is
the second question: it seems most likely that people with above average
musical ability would achieve greater rs through their musical efforts than
people with average ability. Though we commonly say that people like Ricky
Martin and Limp Bizkit have no musical talent at all, this is really just a
manner of speaking; they aren't geniuses, but it seems likely that even top
40 musicians have to have above average musical abilities to be successful.
What I would suggest is that this problem could be explained in terms of
trade-offs. Musical ability may be correlated with personality traits that
lower rs; perhaps musical ability correlates with, for example, high
risk-taking behavior that would on average be maladaptive. So while
musical ability would, in some cases, lead to a sexual jackpot, it would,
in most cases, lead to death and failure. So, pinning your fitness on your
musical ability would be a high-stakes, high-risk gamble. It would perhaps
be safest then not to be extraordinarily musically talented but musically
competent. Average musical competence would seem to be adaptive: you can
impress women with your taste by dancing well and having good taste in
music without being exceptionally gifted in music.
Anyway, the whole question is a wretched confusion because we don't know
what creativity or musical ability even means or how the concept can be
operationalized for empirical testing. We just have that one study I
posted that showed that pitch recognition was highly heritable. And, by
the way, there's no evidence that musical ability is distributed along a
bell-curve: it may have some other distribution, which would indicate that
an entirely different explanation is called for. We just don't know!
Hence all these "it would seem likely's", "probably's", and "maybe's".
It's difficult to do EP. People like Steven Rose and SJ Gould would be
like pigs in clover reading this: "What speculative adaptationist
story-telling!" they would sneer. However, all science begins in
story-telling: what makes it science is that it eventually gets beyond
story-telling into testable hypotheses, which EP hypotheses often do, as
I've pointed out over and over again on this list. The fact that we have
to rely on this intuitive, common-sensical reasoning just indicates that a
hell of a lot more research needs to be done, not that the project is
worthless. Given that evolutionary hypotheses have been so extremely
successful in understanding the nature of other traits of living things, we
should give it the benefit of the doubt that it will eventually help us
understand this one. Anyway, what should be clear is that anyone who says,
"There is no possible adaptationist explanation for artistic creativity",
like George did, is ranting.
As for the mother/child explanation of the evolution of music, read
Dissayanake's "Art and Intimacy", where she deals with this hypothesis. I
haven't read the book, but I heard her talk about it at a conference. I'm
not very impressed by this hypothesis though. It doesn't seem plausible
that whether or not a mother sings to her child would make a difference in
the mother's fitness. So, I think mothers' singing to their kids is likely
to be a byproduct of a trait that evolved for some other reason.
Anyway, you might be interested in Miller's paper on the evolution of
music at ftp://ada.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/draftfin.pdf Also, see his _The
Mating Mind_ and the article in _The Evolution of Culture_ that I cited.
Ian Jobling
>
>
> Arnie Cox
> Assistant Professor Office (440) 775-8945
> Oberlin College Conservatory of Music Home (440) 775-3174
> 77 W. College St. Fax (440) 775-8942
> Oberlin, OH 44074 Arnie.Cox@oberlin.edu
>
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