The second school believes music

The title of the newest and fourteenth book by science writer Philip Ball leaves no doubt: this is a counter-attack on claims made by Steven Pinker in his publications The Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works (1997). Pinker characterized music as ‘auditory cheesecake’ (1997: 534): a tasty bonus but, from an evolutionary point of view, no more than a by-product of much more important mental functions such as language ‘music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged’ (1997: 528). In his books, Pinker also frequently reduces art to what – biologically speaking – is an irrelevant phenomenon, one that utilizes functions that can be called ‘evolutionarily adaptive’, such as the experience of pleasure. The provocation these claims represented some fifteen years ago continues to resonate: countless books referring to Pinker have appeared since (such as The Art Instinct (Dutton 2009), The Belief Instinct (Bering 2011) and The Pleasure Instinct (Wallenstein 2009)). And now, not entirely unexpectedly, here is The Music Instinct. The aim is clear. And so this book begins with a discussion of the importance of music, the possible role of music in evolution and the claim that music is not a luxury. It is a topical discussion currently being pursued in numerous scientific journals and at symposia. At least three schools of thought can be identified in the scholarly search for an evolutionary role for music. Despite Pinker’s criticism, the first school remains intent on proving that music is indeed an adaptation. Though some view the scientific study of the evolution of cognition, including music cognition, as an absolute impossibility, doomed forever to remain nothing more than a good story, several researchers are presently developing strategies to empirically underpin the cognitive and biological role of musicality. In particular, there is a lot of support for Darwin’s suggestion that sexual selection must have played a role in the origin of music. In this view, music serves as a sexy tuft of feathers, developed not as an adaptation for survival but as an adaptation to impress potential partners. Geoffrey Miller expands on this idea in his book The Mating Mind, where music is considered one of the many effective ways people use to try to impress other members of their species. But there are also alternative views within this school, such as the one that sees music as a game played with our cognitive functions, resulting in an evolutionary advantage. In this case, rather than being viewed as a product of natural selection – an adaptation – musicality is thought to be a trait resulting from exaptation, that is, without special selection having taken place. Once this trait exists, it is further perfected by natural or sexual selection and as such passed on to successive generations.