The Role of the Baldwin Effect in the Evolution of Human Musicality

Abstract

From the biological perspective human musicality is the term referred to as a set of abilities which enable the recognition and production of music. Since music is a complex phenomenon which consists of features that represent different stages of the evolution of human auditory abilities, the question concerning the evolutionary origin of music must focus mainly on music specific properties and their possible biological function or functions. What usually differentiates music from other forms of human sound expressions is a syntactically organized structure based on pitch classes and rhythmic units measured in reference to musical pulse. This structure is an auditory (not acoustical) phenomenon, meaning that it is a human-specific interpretation of sounds achieved thanks to certain characteristics of the nervous system. There is historical and cross-cultural diversity of this structure which indicates that learning is an important part of the development of human musicality. However, the fact that there is no culture without music, the syntax of which is implicitly learned and easily recognizable, suggests that human musicality may be an adaptive phenomenon. If the use of syntactically organized structure as a communicative phenomenon were adaptive it would be only in circumstances in which this structure is recognizable by more than one individual. Therefore, there is a problem to explain the adaptive value of an ability to recognize a syntactically organized structure that appeared accidentally as the result of mutation or recombination in an environment without a syntactically organized structure. The possible solution could be explained by the Baldwin effect in which a culturally invented trait is transformed into an instinctive trait by the means of natural selection. It is proposed that in the beginning musical structure was invented and learned thanks to neural plasticity. Because structurally organized music appeared adaptive (phenotypic adaptation) e.g., as a tool of social consolidation, our predecessors started to spend a lot of time and energy on music. In such circumstances, accidentally one individual was born with the genetically controlled development of new neural circuitry which allowed him or her to learn music faster and with less energy use.

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

“…in a virtuous spiral. We thus posit essentially an iterated Baldwin effect (Baldwin 1896;Bateson 2004;Griffiths 2003;Podlipniak 2017), or more generally, prolonged cognitive "niche construction" (Laland et al 2000). This mechanism is closely related to many contemporary models of language evolution involving a series of "protolanguages" (Arbib 2005;Fitch 2010Fitch , 2017.…”

Origins of music in credible signaling

“…Savage and colleagues propose that musicality arose fairly recently in human ancestry as a cultural invention to enhance social bonding, and was then elaborated via gene-culture evolution over tens of thousands of years (see also Podlipniak 2017).…”

The Role of Canalization and Plasticity in the Evolution of Musical Creativity

“…In this example, a cultural invention-farming-became a starting point for a chain of interdependent coevolutionary events. Similar coevolutionary mechanisms have been proposed for the evolution of many human traits such as handedness, mating preference (Laland, 2008), language Jablonka, 2000, 2001;Bickerton, 2010;Deacon, 2010) and music (Podlipniak, 2017;Patel, 2018;Savage et al, 2020). Music in gene-culture coevolution was initially invented by hominins and by having an adaptive function, music abilities have been preferred by natural selection which has strengthened and accelerated the evolution of human musicality.…”

“…The result is Homo sapien musical culture which can be characterized by the influence of at least four levels of constrains: (1) inherited perceptive and behavioral biases which influence the existence of musical universals; (2) enculturated (culturally inherited) biases which consists of implicitly learned elements of a musical system such as culture-specific pitch intervals and rhythm ratios; (3) limitations of creativity which are related to the efficiency of the brain, restricted for instance, by the capacity of working memory; (4) social selective pressures which act as feedback able to modify former constraints in the long run. The existence of all these constraints indicates that gene-culture coevolution (Lumsden and Wilson, 1980) could have been an evolutionary mechanism leading to the origins of human musicality (Podlipniak, 2015(Podlipniak, , 2017Killin, 2016Killin, , 2017Patel, 2018;Savage et al, 2020). It is worth mentioning, that all these aforesaid constraints act simultaneously and must have been present at all stages of our gene-culture coevolution, which has led to the emergence of human musical culture.…”