NATURAL DESIRES
In previous posts, I have argued that if the good is the desirable, then human ethics is natural insofar as it satisfies the natural human desires that naturally win social approval as useful or agreeable to oneself or to others. The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a natural standard for judging social life as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances.
By this standard, the modern bourgeois liberal regime can be recognized as the best regime so far in human history, because no other regime has satisfied those natural desires so well for so many people. Or, to put it another way, the liberal regime has been more successful than any other regime so far in securing for human beings their equal liberty for the pursuit of happiness.
In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires: human beings generally desire (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identify, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social ranking, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) political rule, (10) war, (11) health, (12) beauty, (13) property, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, (18) aesthetic pleasure, (19) religious transcendence, and (20) intellectual understanding.
I have argued that these twenty natural desires are universally found in all human societies, that they have evolved by natural selection over millions of years of human evolutionary history to become components of the species-specific nature of human beings, that they are rooted in the neurophysiological mechanisms of the brain, that they direct and limit the social variability of human beings as adapted to diverse ecological circumstances, and that different individuals with different temperaments and talents will rank these desires differently.
Lockean liberal individualism recognizes that there is no single summum bonum or highest good for all human beings because there is no one right way to rank those natural desires. But each individual will have a summum bonum--a ranking of those natural desires with one being the highest--depending on the propensities and capacities of each individual. A Socrates will rank intellectual understanding as the highest good. A Saint Augustine will rank religious transcendence as the highest. An Abraham Lincoln will rank political rule as the highest. A General George Patton will rank war as the highest.
There is evidence that this pattern of twenty desires developed in the Late Pleistocene environment of our hunting-gathering ancestors, from about 130,000 years ago up to the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago. This was the evolutionary environment in which human nature was shaped by natural selection. This is what John Locke called "the state of nature." The historical record of human civilization since the development of agriculture shows human beings as moved by these twenty desires.
I am now prepared to include the natural desire for music as one of the twenty natural desires--perhaps as belonging to aesthetic pleasure. I was recently prompted to think more about this when I attended the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra's performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Choral Symphony--indeed, it was the first symphony to include choral singing--which is famous for its "Ode to Joy" chorus in the last movement.
THE MYSTERY OF MUSIC
For Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), music was a mystery:
As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed. They are present, though in a very rude condition, in men of all races, even the most savage; but so different is the taste of the sever races, that our music give no pleasure to savages, and their music is to us in most cases hideous and unmeaning (2004, 636).
Darwin observed that while the nations of Western Europe were similar in their music, there were cultural differences in the way they interpreted music. And in the eastern regions of the world, there were very different languages of music.
He saw evidence that our prehistoric human ancestors had music. Prehistoric flutes made out of the bones and horns of reindeer found in caves together with flint tools was evidence of instrumental music. The arts of singing and dancing also seemed to be very ancient and practiced today by all human races. Poetry could be included as an ancient form of music because it arose from singing.
Darwin also saw that the anthropomorphous monkeys and apes use their vocal organs to express strong emotions through musical tones and rhythm--particularly during the season of courtship, when males are trying to attract females for mating and to repulse their male rivals. For Darwin, this was to be explained as evolving by sexual selection rather than natural selection.
From all of this evidence, Darwin inferred that "musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex," and that "musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language." He noted, however, that Herbert Spencer had come to the opposite conclusion--"that the cadences used in emotional speech afford the foundation from which music has been developed" (2004, 638-39).
Darwin thus raised, either explicitly or implicitly, almost all the questions about the evolution of music that evolutionary scientists have debated over the past 150 years. Is music a single propensity or capacity? Or does music have many different components, such as rhythm, melody, and harmony, that produce many different forms of music--song, instrumental music, dance, and poetry?
Is music a universal human instinct? Or does the cultural diversity of music show that it is not a human universal?
Did music evolve by natural selection or sexual selection? Or did it arise only as a by-product of other traits that were selected for--such as language?
Is music unique to human beings? Or can we find at least some of the rudimentary components of music in other animals?
Is there any fossil record of prehistoric human music?
If music did arise through some process of evolutionary selection, what was it selected for? What is its ultimate function? Or does it potentially serve many different functions?
What is the evolutionary relation between music and language? Did one come before the other?
Can we identify the neurobiological mechanism for music--perhaps a "music module" in the brain? Or does music arise from many interconnected networks in the brain?
Although there has been no final resolution of the debates over these questions, it is now possible to plausibly argue for some tentative answers.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF MUSIC
We should begin by distinguishing music and musicality, which allows us to see that while musicality is culturally universal, music is culturally variable (Honing 2018; Fitch 2018). Musicality includes components such as melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic cognition; and it is that part of our biological nature that gives human beings in all cultures the propensity and the capacity to generate and enjoy all forms of music. But music in all its variety is culturally constructed through the biological power of human musicality. Music then is like language in its biological universality and cultural diversity. All human beings normally have a biological instinct for learning and using a language. But different human beings will learn different languages in different cultures.
There are at least four explanations for how musicality is grounded in human biology. The first is Darwin's theory of sexual selection in which music evolved as a way of attracting sexual mates and thus increasing reproductive success (Miller 2000; Prum 2017). This theory often includes Darwin's idea that the neural structures that evolved for musicality were precursors of both music and language.
Another theory is that music originated in the maternal music-like vocalizations to infants, including soothing lullabies, and the dance-like maternal movements with infants that promote parent-infant bonding and the well-being of infants (Dissanayake, 2008, 2021).
A third theory is that music evolved to promote and maintain group cohesion. Among prehistoric human ancestors, group singing and dancing would have glued people together in large groups (Dunbar, 2010, 2012).
These three theories are adaptationist explanations that see music as an evolutionary adaptation by natural or sexual selection. But a fourth theory explains the origin of music not as originally an evolutionary adaptation but as an evolutionary by-product of other skills that were adaptive. Music could have been originally a human invention--like the control of fire and the invention of cooking--that became universal in human societies because it was advantageous for human life, and then through gene-culture coevolution, this could have led to neurophysiological changes that deepened the grounding of music in human biology (Patel, 2010, 2018).
Music as Social Bonding
There is still another theory, however, that can embrace all four of these theories. Patrick Savage and his colleagues (2021) have argued for the hypothesis that human musicality is a coevolved system for social bonding. Actually, this can be seen as an expanded version of the "group cohesion" theory. Let's define the three key terms in this statement
First, as already indicated, musicality denotes the biological capacities of all human beings that allow us to perceive and produce music, while the word "music" denotes the diverse musical systems produced by different cultures.
Second, social bonding refers to all kinds of affiliative connections that bind two or more people into a group. Such social bonding would have enhanced the survival and reproduction of our prehistoric human ancestors by enhancing protection from predators, cooperative child-rearing, collaborative foraging and hunting, and the expansion and defense of territories (Dunbar, 2012b; Hrdy, 2009). Music and dance would have promoted such social bonding by synchronizing and harmonizing the emotions, thoughts, and actions of two or more individuals. This would have strengthened mate bonding, infant care, and group cohesion.
I have written about the natural desire for membership in a society and how such membership requires markers of social identity. Music and dancing could have provided those markers for our prehistoric ancestors. We see that today in how singing a national anthem (like America's "Star-Spangled Banner" or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee") can strengthen the emotional bonding of people in a nation.
But while social bonding through music sounds warm and cozy, we should recognize the dark side of this: in-group social bonding often means hostility toward out-groups--the tribalism of "us" versus "them." Throughout history, tribalist movements (like the Nazis) have used music to move their supporters to unite in attacking their perceived enemies.
We should also recognize that while social bonding might be the original overarching function of music, that does not mean that this is its only function. Once music has become part of our evolved human nature, we can use it for purposes other than social bonding. For example, people enjoy playing or listening to music alone. Sometimes they do this to evoke memories of some previous social experience of the music--such as the lover who listens to music that he associates with his beloved. But sometimes people listen to music alone just to regulate their moods.
The third key term in the music as social bonding hypothesis is coevolved. This means that musicality has evolved through a process of gene-culture coevolution, which has been a topic in previous posts. It is possible that "musical behavior first arose as a human invention and then had (unanticipated) beneficial effects on social cohesion" (Patel, 2018, 118). This then created cognitive and social niches in which both biological and cultural selection could favor those particular forms of music that most effectively promoted social bonding. This is what I have previously identified as symbolic niche construction.
This is all very clever, you are surely thinking, but isn't it just speculative "just-so storytelling" that can't be empirically verified or falsified--particularly since the fossil and archaeological record of prehistoric human evolution offers very little evidence of when and how our ancient ancestors made music and for what purposes?
Well, actually there is some fossil and archaeological evidence, even if limited, for prehistoric music. And this is only the first of five kinds of evidence that can support the music as social bonding theory.
Five Kinds of Evidence
As we've seen, Darwin considered the discovery of Ice Age bone flutes as clear evidence for the antiquity of music among our earliest human ancestors. As indicated in a previous post, the earliest bone flutes have been dated to over 35,000 years ago (Conard, Malina, and Munzel, 2009). This is only a sample of an extensive record of prehistoric musical instruments (Morley, 2013).
The second kind of evidence that music is part of our evolved human nature is the cross-cultural evidence for music as a human universal. Music, like language, is manifest universally in all known cultures (Brown, 1991). Moreover, Mehr et al. (2019) found 20 widespread functional contexts in which music was important: (1) dance, (2) infancy, (3) healing, (4) religious activity, (5) play, (6) procession, (7) mourning, (8) ritual, (9) entertainment, (10) children, (11) mood/emotions, (12) work, (13) storytelling, (14) greeting visitors, (15) war, (16) praise, (17) love, (18) group bonding, (19) marriage/weddings, and (20) art/creation. Notice that all of these functional contexts relate to social bonding.
Also, Savage et al. (2015) have identified 19 features of musical structure that are widespread in all or most cultures. Most of these support coordinated music-making:
Throughout the world, humans tend to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups, and this is facilitated by the widespread use of simple-integer pitch and rhythm ratios, scales based on a limited number of discrete pitches (usually no more than 7), and isochronomous beats grouped in multiples of two or three. . . . The widespread use of simple, discrete meters and scales also enables multiple people to memorize and coordinate their performances. These widespread musical properties have few direct parallels in language. Group coordination provides a common purpose that unifies the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music (Savage et al., 2021, 8).
This is impressive cross-cultural evidence for the universality of musicality as an evolved instinct of human nature that supports social bonding.
There is also developmental evidence for the early development of the social functions of music in infancy and early childhood (Savage et al., 2021, 9). Infants respond to songs from their adult caregivers, such as lullabies, with similar, cross-culturally recognizable acoustic features. Infants respond differently to lullabies as distinguished from play-songs. Music improves parent-infant social bonding. Young children also show more sociable behavior when they are engaged in group musical activities. Music shapes children's social bonds.
A fourth kind of evidence for musicality as promoting social bonding is social psychological evidence. Social psychologists have conducted behavioral experiments that show how musical behavior enhances social cooperation (Savage et al., 2021, 9-10). For example, when people dance in synchrony, they feel connected to the group with whom they're dancing. And people who sing in large choirs develop feelings of social closeness with their fellow singers.
The fifth kind of evidence for music as rooted in evolved human nature has to do with the neurobiological proximate mechanisms for music and social bonding. There is some evidence "that the dopaminergic reward system interacts with the endogenous opioid system and the release of oxytocin, ultimately providing opportunities for individuals to synchronize their moods, emotions, actions, and/or perspectives through musical engagement," which would serve music's social bonding functions. Moreover, "people who frequently experience chills when listening to music show high white matter connectivity between auditory, social, and reward-processing areas" (Savage et al., 2021, 10-12; Sachs et al., 2016).
One indirect way to infer how the normally functioning brain supports musicality and social bonding is to study those people with abnormal brains that cause some of them to be unable to "hear" music at all and others to be extraordinarily responsive to music. This is what Oliver Sacks did in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). He described many cases of people with amusia--being unable to recognize or enjoy music. In some cases, this was congenital (from birth). In others, it was acquired (from some injury to the brain). (The Wikipedia article on "Amusia" is a good short survey.)
Sacks tells the story of D.L., a seventy-six-year-old woman who had never heard music. Although she came from a musical family in which everyone played an instrument, she never liked music because it just sounded like noise to her. As a little girl, a family friend who was a specialist in teaching music tested her with pitches, but she could not tell if one note was higher than another.
When people asked her what she heard when music was played, she would say, "If you were in my kitchen and threw all the pots and pans on the floor, that's what I hear!"
She couldn't recognize the simplest tune, such as "Happy Birthday to You." On the other hand, she seemed to have a good sense of rhythm in her body because as a girl she loved to tap dance.
While D.L. was an example of congenital amusia, Sachs also saw cases of acquired amusia. Professor B. was a gifted musician who had played with the New York Philharmonic. But after having a stroke, he was suddenly unable to discern a tune. He perceived pitch and rhythm, but he could not synthesize them into a melody.
While Sacks saw Professor B. as an example of melody deafness, he saw Rachel Y. was an example of harmony deafness. She had been a talented composer and performer. But then she was in a car accident where she suffered severe head and spine injuries. Afterwards, she heard all music as discrete lines but was unable to perceive the harmonic sense of chordal passages. She could not harmonize different voices and instruments.
In contrast to these cases of musical deafness, Sacks also studied cases of hypermusicality--people who show an extraordinary love of music. Some of the best cases were people with the congenital disorder known as Williams Syndrome. They are visibly distinctive because of their elfin-like faces.
Williams syndrome is a rare genetic condition that causes facial characteristics including epicanthal folds at the eyes, large ears, an upturned nose, full cheeks, a wide mouth, a small jaw and small teeth.
Williams Syndrome is caused by the deletion of 26-28 genes on the long arm of chromosome 7. Individuals with Williams Syndrome typically have mild to moderate intellectual deficits (IQs around 60), cardiovascular disease, and the distinctive facial characteristics just indicated. Their cognitive profile includes normal language and facial processing skills but deficient visuospatial abilities (Martens, Wilson, and Reutens, 2008).
The personality of Williams Syndrome people is hypersociable: they're unusually friendly and loquacious--longing to connect and bond with others. They also show a heightened interest in and emotional responsiveness to music and musical activities (Thakur et al., 2018). Sacks tells the story of Gloria Lenhoff, a woman with Williams Syndrome who could sing over 2,000 operatic arias in more than 30 languages. But she could not add five plus three.
This seems to confirm Howard Gardner's theory of "multiple intelligences"--that rather than having some kind of general intelligence (perhaps measured by IQ scores), human brains have as many as eight separate kinds of intelligence. Williams Syndrome people seem to have high social intelligence and musical intelligence but are deficient in logico-mathematical intelligence.
Apparently, this has something to do with the abnormal size and shape of the brain in Williams Syndrome people. Their brains on average are about twenty percent smaller than normal brains. And the ratio of frontal lobe volume to combined parietal and occipital lobe volume is abnormally high.
But the primary point here for evolutionary theories of music is that the combination in Williams Syndrome people of hypermusicality and hypersociability seems to support the social bonding theory of the origin of music.
My next post will be on "The Political History of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." That post will include a list of bibliographic references.
