The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

Cultural evolution possesses characteristics that distinguish it from

biological evolution.

Let us start off with a standard definition:cultures are “systems of sym-

bolically encoded conceptual phenomena that are socially and histori-

cally transmitted within and between populations”(Durham 1991:8–9).

This leads logically to the idea of a dual inheritance system:in the human

species,a new system—culture—came to be added onto the genetic

system characteristic of living things in general.This inheritance system

is distinct from and partly independent of the genetic inheritance system,

but is subject to the same law of perpetual transformation that is mani-

fested in biological evolution:“...all human cultures are related by his-

torical derivation”(Durham 1991:185).However,the system of cultural

symbols differs from genetic systems in at least two major respects.

First,biological evolution is Darwinian in that there is no transmission

of acquired characteristics;on the other hand,cultural evolution seems

quite Lamarckian,since information acquired at each generation can be

transmitted in whole to the next generation.

Second,mutations,which introduce into the genotype variations that

make evolution possible,occur by chance;cultural variation occurs,in

part,in a random manner,but can also proceed in a directedmanner.

This corresponds to orthogenetic phenomena,excluded in biological

evolution but central to this second hereditary system.Technology and

science are striking examples of directed evolution,as if their develop-

ment occurred by means of problems to which successively more satis-

fying solutions were given by trial and error.Phenomena of the same

type are found in all of the many domains of culture.

If two systems of transmission and transformation of information exist

in this way,musicologists,linguists,and more generally specialists in the

human sciences have a privileged interest in the question of the rela-

tionship between these systems.Two approaches seem available.On the

one hand,we could,together with evolutionary psychologists,search for

mental modules that supposedly underlie the capacities that appeared

during the course of human evolution as adaptations to environmental

conditions (Barkow,Cosmides,and Tooby 1992).On the other hand,we

could turn to the study of cultural transmission itself,which although

dependent on the biological evolution of mental modules produced

through environmental adaptation,deals with objects that are suscepti-

ble to the partly autonomous process of directed evolution.Thus,if one

wants to apply the scheme of universal Darwinism to culture,the first

step is to identify cultural units of replication,variation,and selection;

in other words,units corresponding to genes in biological evolution.In

his book The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins proposed the

name “meme”for this unit of information that passes from one brain to

167 Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language