Musical complexity as a directly encoded honest signal of spatio-temporal adaptation to rapid-detached-tool 3D subsistence.
The question of how and why music has evolved has been entertained and discussed among disciplines as disparate as Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, and Physics and has been pondered for thousands of years. Although recent literature has exploded in potential solutions to this ancient mystery, it seems that no clear answers are claiming exclusive [authority]. Problems range from the fact that there are no clear methodologies or experts as music spans so many disciplines, to the ethical, chronological, and funding problems of testing these hypotheses, especially in the case of humans. The fact that it remains such as challenge to even define "music" at all is testimony to this fact that it is a [multifarious] problem. This paper attempts to set up a general framework for explaining how music might have evolved in the human lineage. The first step is to define music in a way that is most inclusive of all human musics and yet is exclusive enough to capture some of the finer complexities which separate human musicality from the universe of normal animal communication vocalizations. The equally complex and evolutionarily convergent musics of whales, birds, and gibbons must also be addressed in this framework as the complexity and structural similarity is on par with that of most human societies. Once music is defined, and the fundamental universally occurring psychoacoustic integral structures of music are parameterized, one can finally venture out into exploring the answers to our main questions at hand: is music adaptive? And why is it adaptive?
The first question is it adaptive, lends itself to an intuitive plea: if it is everywhere in humans and convergent in four distinct phylogenetic taxons it must have some value to its practitioners. The question with humans is a little more complicated because musical behavior might now be an exaptation, a trait that once had direct fitness benefits but that is now more of a side effect of ancestry. But still interesting and worth researching is the question of whether or not it was once adaptive and how it might have been adaptive in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness [EEA]. But as a null hypothesis, we must consider the possibility that music is not an adaptation (evolved as an adaptation at some point) and instead evolved by accident, at least in the lineage under investigation (in this case: humans). Counter-adaptationist claims must first be addressed before possible adaptations can be explored: arguments that music may have evolved out of a byproduct of some closely related adaptation (language) or other natural phenomenon (acoustic periodicity and correlated harmonic structure) are also addressed and dismissed. After null arguments are addressed and possible causes of musical adaptation are justifiably discussed. Ultimate causes of musical fitness conferring benefits are explored under the honest signaling framework (collapsing sexual and group selection into one larger phenomenon). Finally, proximate mechanisms which account for the inherent intervallic structure universally present in all four musical species are discussed. It is hypothesized that music arose in all three species as a directly encoded honest signal of spatio-temporal adaptation to rapid 3D subsistence. In the case of humans, this rapid 3D subsistence is speculated to be in the form of ballistic hunting--the high speed tool precisely projected through three dimensional space.
