Friday, September 11, 2020

Origins of Human Music as the Zahavi "Handicap Principle" of evolution: Bjorn Merker and Neanderthal Cave Flute Music

 The elaboration of Zahavi’s handicap principle in the developmental stress hypothesis to account for complexity and size of birdsong repertoires by Hasselquist and colleagues (Hasselquist et al. 1996; Nowicki et al. 2002; see Theses 2 and 4) provides an eminently plausible interpretive framework for the nature and function of human song and music as well. It dispels the appearance of frivolity encumbering our expenditure of effort and resources on acquiring and producing the pattern richness of human song and music. Our musical developmental trajectory does not equip us with a language-like device for conveying referential meaning (emotional or otherwise). Rather, by exact analogy to the case of learned birdsong, it gives us a means to display command and mastery of a trove of culturally patterned and transmitted lore. Such command and mastery serves not only as a badge of competence in the culture, but as a certificate of the phenotypic traits needed to achieve that competence (see further Merker 2012, 2014b).

Seven Theses on the Biology of Music and Language Bjorn Merker 

fascinating. Especially from the perspective of spiritual healing through music meditation....

 So much so that those that sound exceptionally good tend to impress, even to the point of inspiring awe and a sense of the sublime, emotions so powerful as to drive tears to our eyes and chills up our spines (Gabrielsson 2011; Konečni 2005, 2011; Merker 2014b). 52That is where the notion of an emotional impact of music has its true point of support: not in any analogy to the meaning encoded in language, nor in any kinship with the biology of basic emotions, but in the basic biology of the Zahavian handicap principle (Zahavi 1975).

yes and even more than that!!

 This really makes sense indeed - ties into Chris Knight's "Darwinian Deception" model on the origin of human language also.

 Hurford, J.R. (2000), “The emergence of syntax [Editorial introduction to the section on syntax]”, in Knight, Studdert-Kennedy & Hurford (eds.), The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 219-230.

right - he cites Knight also....or his co-author....

Darwin suggested that the more musically talented proto-humans attracted more sexual partners, or higher-quality sexual partners, than their less-musical rivals. We see sexual selection for music in many other species—insect song, frog song, bird song, whale song, and gibbon song—so I think that's a reasonable default theory for how humans evolved music. It's the theory to beat.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/did-humans-invent-music/255945/

 

 http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/merker_2009_synchronouschorusing_humanorigins.pdf

 and

chapter in this book 

 Neanderthal Bone Flute Music

 http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/hear-the-worlds-oldest-instrument-the-neanderthal-flute.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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