Wyrdsmyth

I think it's analogous to developing an incredibly powerful computer, when all you really need is a basic one. Imagine running "Pong" or "Space Invaders" on a modern computer with a 2 GHz processor and 256 RAM and a state of the art video card. So little of the computer's potential gets used. Now step it up a notch, and imagine a computer that could somehow be self-aware, and realize how little of its attention is actually required for most of its daily tasks. It would get BORED.

The history of art in the context of biological evolution is the history of BOREDOM.

Isn't that how art began? And music? Men were (and are) easily bored. In order to try to use up some of that extra potential, they started to paint, to compose music, to count the days by cutting notches in sticks or bones, and to try to express ideas through speech and writing... and in general letting their imaginations run wild.

The idea that the only way we can explain this sort of thing is that we are "touched by special god-magic" is from that last part... letting our imaginations run wild. Confusing what we imagine with what is real is always a dangerous lure.

Oolon Colluphid

The only problem with that would be, why should we have such an incredible processor in the first place? Brains are expensive things to build and run, so such redundancy must have come quite late in our evolution. Fossil-wise, this seems to be the case.

But I also suspect there was a considerable positive feedback loop, where things like ‘musical’ talent, ability to tell jokes, make nice decorations on your wooden tools, etc – and the brains that leads to them – themselves became features selected for, in conjunction with the free time for social interaction that bigger brains led to.

The best book on all this (which I possess but haven’t gotten round to yet) seems to be Steven Mithen’s
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0500050813/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science</a>.

Oolon

Wyrdsmyth

Yeah, that's a good question. But I don't think we have to have a working assumption that "Nature goes for the bare minimum requirements, and that's all" either. Our brains evolved to be more than what was needed for mere hunting and gathering and a basic level of socializing. One of the things "selected" or "invested in" in our evolution was smarts... Other animals invested in size, or speed. Does that alligator really need to be 18' long, couldn't it get by being 15' long? Does the spine-tailed swift really need to be able to fly 106 miles per hour? Couldn't it get by on 95 mph? It's not just in our case that nature has overdone it.

But it seems reasonable that, yeah, there is probably some kind of two-way street, a feedback of some sort, that develops and then emphasizes certain characteristics of our brain... like musical skill, artistic skill, speaking skill, etc. Something works, or gets positive reinforcement, and it gets emphasized and "selected," sure. Maybe I'll pick up that Steven Mithen book, that sounds interesting.

[ April 09, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

Amen-Moses

I bet it's related to sex.

Amen-Moses

Jubal

Mating behaviour.

***DAMN! He beat me to it!***

[ April 09, 2002: Message edited by: Swan-eater ]</p>

Wyrdsmyth

Yeah, haven't you ever seen pretty girls flocking around an ugly guitarist?

DRFseven

When one area of the brain gets built up, adjacent areas get a sometimes serendipitous build-up, too. <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/LEM/" target="_blank"> This link</a>, from neurophysiologist and evolutionary theorist, William H. Calvin's website discusses the ideas in Lingua ex Machina, by Calvin and linguist, Dick Bickerton,of how the human brain could have arisen "without scaffolding" from the pre-syntactic brain through the cognitive categories necessary for reciprocal altruism, which provided a basis for syntactic structure or from the circuitry involved in ballistic movements (throwing at targets) via Darwinian conversion of function instead of gradualism.

JB01

I think there are a couple of flaws in reasoning in some of the proposed explanations that have shown up in this thread.

The social cohesion hypothesis is incomplete. Even if we grant that music facilitates social cohesion because people tend to flock to those who produce appealing noises, we still need some explanation for why those sounds hold such appeal for us in the first place.

The idea that our creative abilities can be explained by nature not stopping at a bare minimum seems wrong to me. Every incremental increase in brain capacity has an associated cost (metabolically and from the standpoint of ease of childbirth) that must be outweighed by some other benefit in order to drift towards fixation. The fact that brain capacity has apparently remained constant throughout the history of our species suggests that we have reached an equilbrium between the drive to increase capacity and the cost of the increase. I don't think you can say the evolution provides free lunches.

The runaway sexual selection hypothesis seems plausible, if incomplete - again, why does music hold appeal for us in the first place?

My pet hypothesis, which I would be interested in hearing comments on, is that the evolutionary explanation of music is related to memory. For most of the evolutionary history of our species, culture was clearly important, but in the absence of written language, the only mechanism for transmission of culture between generations was oral. The persistence of a body of cultural lore in prehistoric times would have made much greater demands on the rote memory of individuals than we experience today; they would have been required to memorize the equivalent of entire books virtually word for word. I propose that music arose (along with poetry) as a mnemonic device to aid in verbatim recall. As evidence, I would comment that some people with neurological speech deficits, who can no longer speak conversationally, are still capable of singing familiar songs. This suggests to me that musical memory makes use of a separate and specialized part of the brain.

What I like about this explanation is that it might account for why music could have had great adaptive value during our evolution even though it has no such (apparent) value today.

Oolon Colluphid

JB01, I really like that idea. Certainly, oral poetry was usually sung, not recited. Well, 'certainly' in the case of Homeric epics. The Greeks had specially trained people, rhapsodoi, who sang the poems, and the first words in Western 'literature' are (IIRC) "Sing", O Goddess, of the wrath of Acchileus". Similarly, Celtic peoples seem to have sung their poetry (eg IIRC the Taliesin), leading to Eisteddfods etc. I understand that Baltic tribes still sang their oral cultural tales till quite recently.

So okay, it may help explain music. What of the other arts? It now occurs to me that also involved is our abilities to create, understand and manipulate symbols...

Oolon

Philosoft

Not really. As Dawkins and others have demonstrated with mating behavior, all that is strictly necessary is a means to manifest a preference. Gene mutations may or may not be the source of musical preferences but they are sufficient to explain such preferences.

<strong> Yes and no. If the capacity for creative change already exists, then all that is required is a mutation to make it happen.

<strong> See above.

<strong> Seems reasonable.