The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

I suggest that the innovation leading to song changing in whales may

be driven by sexual selection.Geoffrey Miller (this volume) makes a

powerful argument for this perspective as applied to human musician-

ship as well.Such a process does not necessarily imply conscious choice,

yet it is evidence of mental versatility.The process of song change we

documented in whales has much in common with a human phenomenon

called linguistic drift.Edward Sapir (1921/1949:171–172),in his classic

book Language,described drift without reference to purpose,as follows:

Language moves down time in a current of its own.It has a drift...Every word,

every grammatical element,every locution,every sound and accent is a slowly

changing configuration molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the

life of the language.The evidence is overwhelming that this drift has a certain

consistent direction.Its speed varies enormously according to circumstances that

it is not always easy to define...The general drift of a language has its depths.

At the surface the current is relatively fast.In certain features dialects drift apart

rapidly.By that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental

to the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in which

the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be mutually alien forms

of speech.But this is not all.The momentum of the more fundamental,the pre-

dialectic,drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through

the same or strikingly similar phases...

Even though language is generally associated with conscious behav-

ior,linguistic drift as Sapir described it is apparently not the result of

146 Katharine Payne

Figure 9.8

Percentage of occurrence of each alternate form of theme seven in each period of the

1976–1977 and 1977–1978 seasons.Only one song session in each of the two and one-half

periods 1977–1978 contains theme seven because this theme was dying out.The percent-

ages in those periods thus reflect the songs of just one whale.(From Payne,Tyack,and

Payne 1983.)

Fig.9.8