The evolution of music: One trait, many ultimate-level explanations

Dubourg, Edgar; André, Jean‐Baptiste; Baumard, Nicolas

doi:10.1017/s0140525x20001156

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 987 publications

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“… Savage P. et al (2021) proposed an overarching social bonding function of musicality connecting mother–offspring bonding, romantic pair bonding, and in-group bonding. Others have explained the multiple functions of musicality as a fortuitous sequence of co-optations/exaptations to perform new functions followed by new selection (e.g., Trainor, 2015 ; Garfinkel, 2018 ; Dubourg et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality’s many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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“…This led to crafting kayaks, for instance, because they meet the purpose of travelling on water, in order to fulfill evolved motivations such as getting food, meeting social partners, and exploring new places. This reasoning also applies to symbolic culture such as alphabets (Dehaene, 2004;Changizi et al, 2006;Morin et al, 2019), fakenews (Altay et al, 2020), shamanism (Singh, 2018), make-up (Sperber and Hirschfeld, 2004), puritanical norms (Fitouchi et al, 2021), and symphonic orchestra (Mehr et al, 2020;Dubourg et al, 2021c). For instance, painters have discovered that, for some population, direct gaze (Morin, 2013) and "neotenic" features (big eyes or round faces; Costa and Corazza, 2006) in portraits are likely to attract the viewer's attention, which is we argue the ultimate motivation of painters.…”

Section: A Middle-ground Solution: Fictions As Culturally Evolved Tec...mentioning

confidence: 85%

Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies

Dubourg

Baumard

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions are by-products of the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictions adaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen as entertainment technologies that is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner.

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“…Two authors of this paper proposed yet another alternative: fictional narratives would be technologies that people crafted because the attention they got through their stories provided them with opportunities to flexibly fulfill other adaptive goals, such as enhancing one's reputation or transmitting knowledge to one's kin (Dubourg & Baumard, 2022). In this case, the benefits for the consumers would be less clear (André et al, 2023;Dubourg et al, 2021; for an argument in the framework of signalling theory, see: Verpooten, 2023;De Tiège et al, 2021). In any case, to be able to share fictional stories, humans seem to recycle preexisting cognitive mechanisms that have evolved for other purposes, such as mechanisms related to simulation and communication (e.g., detection of communicative intents; e.g., Heintz & Scott-Phillips, 2023;Cave & Wilson, 2018;Nielsen et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introduction: Fiction As a Puzzle About Human Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Dubourg,

Thouzeau,

Beuchot

et al. 2024

Preprint

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We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology – in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of interindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the pattenrs of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we (1) listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism (i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

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The evolution of music: One trait, many ultimate-level explanations

Abstract: We propose an approach reconciling the ultimate-level explanations proposed by Savage et al. and Mehr et al. as to why music evolved. We also question the current adaptationist view of culture, which too often fails to disentangle distinct fitness benefits.

Cited by 4 publications

References 987 publications

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

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