--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.
There's a better way of thinking about this question than the one I
originally suggested. In order for music to become part of the standard
human species design, which it seems to be obvious it is, it would have
been necessary that it affected the fitness of males among our
hunter-gatherer ancestors to such an extent that music eventually became
part of our ordinary species behavior. Having an average talent in music
enables you to participate in the normal courtship behavior of humans,
singing and dancing. However, if you're a male, you have to impress
females by being of above average ability in something -- male courtship is
more competitive among human males than among females, just as it is among
almost all mammal species because these species are normally polygynous, as
humans are as well. In other species, courtship displays are highly
limited: if you're a deer, you lock horns with other deer; if you're a
seal, you fight with other seals. However, humans have a much greater
variety of courtship displays: human males also fight to display their
prowess, but they have other ways of impressing women as well, such as by
being clever in any number of fields. So, men who were unusually musically
gifted would use this talent as their courtship display by becoming
musicians whereas other men who were very gifted in telling stories would
compete in that way and big men would just act tough. This tendency to
compete sexually in the areas where your talents lie would explain why
musical ability would be most adaptive above the mean and why only a few
men would derive large fitness benefits from musical ability. I think this
explanation makes sense. It's an interesting question.
Ian Jobling
>
> (Along a different line: how common is it for mothers to sing to their
> infants, and how might this fit into the picture?)
>
>
> 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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