should not be mistaken for music’s adaptive function,however.If music
evolved principally under sexual selection,it would make sense for its
enjoyment to be greater when one is surrounded by a large number of
others,especially young,attractive,single others.Rock concerts make
teenagers feel giddy with excitement not because they will feel an
oceanic oneness with their peers in any behaviorally significant way—
there are too many fights after concerts for that theory to work—but
because concerts afford an excellent opportunity for meeting partners.
It is not necessary for us to be aware of this adaptive logic for it to have
worked over many millennia in shaping the group production and enjoy-
ment of music.Apart from mating,the experience of producing music in
a large group may feel good simply for mood-calibration purposes (see
Tooby and Cosmides 1990).Singing lyrical music together,for example,
would have given powerful evidence under ancestral conditions that one
was part of a successful band:a large group of healthy,energetic people
with few social tensions who share a common language.
Many ethnomusicologists (e.g.,Nettl 1983) take a different view on
music’s group-bonding functions,and seem at certain points to view
music as a means for collective access to the supernatural.This merits a
brief evolutionary critique:accessing the supernatural can be the adap-
tive function of a biological trait such as music only if the supernatural
actually exists,and if accessing it gives concrete fitness benefits.Evolu-
tion would not be impressed by animals that merely think they attain
godlike powers through music;they would really have to do it for selec-
tion to favor this function.Of course,convincing others that a supernat-
ural exists and that one has special powers to access it might function as
a perfectly good courtship display.Composers who view music as an
intermediary between humans and gods (e.g.,Stravinsky 1947) are,of
course,setting themselves up for worship as high priests without taking
vows of celibacy.A Plea for More Quantitative Behavioral Data on Music Production and
Reception
As we have seen,evolutionary biology has a rich set of theories con-
cerning sexual selection and animal signal systems,and an ever more
sophisticated set of behavioral research methods for testing hypotheses
about the functions of animal signal systems such as human music.
However,these methods demand much more detailed quantitative data
about music production and reception than are typically available from
ethnomusicology,psychomusicology,or cultural anthropology.In terms
of quantitative data relevant to sexual selection hypotheses,we know353 Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection