Jean Molino

Abstract

To explain the genesis of music and language in evolutionary terms, an essential

question has to be confronted: when and how did the transition occur from

standard Darwinian evolution to a Larmackian form of evolution in which the

inheritance of acquired characteristics, namely, cultural characteristics, became

possible? The symbolic entities that make up cultures can be analyzed from the

standpoint of an evolutionary semiotics or “memetics.” Music and language are

cultural artifacts that do not correspond to natural objects. If we reduce them to

their constituent parameters (corresponding to autonomous modules), and take

into account such activities as poetry, song, dance, and play, we notice that all

these cultural products are based on a common set of modules: melody, rhythm,

and affective semantics. The fundamental hypothesis is that all these activities

have a common genesis, which leads me to make conjectures regarding the

central importance of one or more rhythmic modules in the brain, and the essen-

tial role of imitation in these activities, leading to the hypothesized formation of

mimetic culture based on mimetic representation, without language, but unified

by rhythm. Given this common foundation, music and language would be seen

as having diverged at some later time.

It is once again permitted for a linguist and a musicologist to be inter-

ested in the origins of music and language, even though the subject has

seemed almost completely taboo for around a century. I am referring not

only to the famous decision taken in 1866 by the Société de Linguistique

de Paris to ban all discussions concerning the origins of language,

but to a general atmosphere that has dominated the human sciences

since the beginning of the century. One could draw as a symbol of

this antievolutionary attitude the works of the anthropologist Franz

Boas (1858–1942) which, with those of Ferdinand Saussure (1857–1913),

set down principles of a synchronic and structuralist approach to the

human sciences that was opposed to the historicist perspectives of the

nineteenth century. This approach is still the predominant one among

specialists in the social sciences, who continue to see evolutionary

thinking as pure and simple ideological affirmation impregnated with

the social Darwinism of the end of the nineteenth century. This was

demonstrated no better than in the discussions provoked by sociobiol-

ogy. I believe that it is now desirable and possible to move beyond these

conflicts and to address calmly the problems posed by the origins and

development of the human faculties. One additional reason for this is

that the progress recently made in the study of cognitive capacities in

nonhuman animal species forces us to set out on a new ground the ques-

tion of continuity and discontinuity that unites and separates animals and

humans.

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Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language