Musical sexual selection? My ill-advised inquiry

What role should evolution play in the study of sonic experience? If we want to understand how we hear, listen, and communicate through sound, isn't it necessary to understand where these faculties and abilities came from? Such questions are more vexed than you might think.

The appeal of science is its purported universality, but that's also its flaw, at least when it ignores cultural explanations and human differences. Then again, sometimes I think humanities scholars are second only to Creationists in their rejection of evolutionary thought—and that doesn't seem so great either.

In today's newsletter, I'm going to ignore the clearly posted danger signs and skip blithely through one particular minefield of evolutionary debate: Is music the evolutionary result of sexual competition?

Look, I probably have no business narrating this debate. As a humanist, I basically got zero training in evolutionary psychology, except to learn to take potshots at it. But as we'll see, untrained scientists have often made what are really cultural claims. And that's my wider point in this post: we need more dialogue and co-training in this space.

Luckily, there are evolutionary researchers, like biomusicologists, who are drawing on both kinds of knowledge, providing new ways to think about sound and music in living systems. We'll meet one of them towards the end.

Just so stories

My grad school mentors trained me to look skeptically upon the field of evolutionary psychology and its claim to scientific authority on the topic of “human nature.” To borrow from the title of Donna Haraway's critical essay on primatology, evolutionary psychology is often accused of doing "politics by other means," searching the distant past for the roots of certain foregone conclusions about mind, language, gender, culture, and economic organization.

As you might imagine, some of the most controversial claims of this sort provide evolutionary justification for sex differences: Men are naturally promiscuous while women are naturally selective; men evolved to seek youth and beauty while women evolved to seek status and resources. Even rape has been naturalized as a male "reproductive adaptation."

Of course, feminist and queer theorists have had a lot of sharp criticisms of these ideas. As cultural anthropologist Susan McKinnon put it, "Thus, a hypothetical story of origins is made to stand as proof of the existence and universality of psychological mechanisms.” But even an evolutionary biologist like Stephen Jay Gould warned against such "just-so stories," tales about human nature that can read a bit like Rudyard Kipling's explanation of how the elephant got its trunk.

Sex and the sonic just-so

Are there sonic just-so stories? Definitely. We especially see these contestable claims pop up in the dark and forested no-man's land between ethnomusicology and evolutionary psychology.

Music is confounding to evolutionary thinking because it is universal, yet provides no obvious evolutionary advantage. This conundrum was described by Darwin himself, who wrote in The Descent of Man,

As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.

Now, anyone who has given the least bit of study to the many roles that music plays in social and personal life—from work songs to liturgical chants to the Quiet Storm—can see the flaw in Darwin's supposition here. Music provides affective bonding, social cohesion, stamina and resilience in arduous situations, and other forms of utility in everyday life, all of which, it seems to me, could be helpful to our survival as a species. But even if the usefulness of music is more apparent to us today than in Darwin's time, that still doesn't tell us why music appeared to begin with.

So, Darwin came up with an influential "just-so" conjecture about the evolution of music: Animals made sounds while mating. In time, these sounds came to attract animals that wanted to mate. Musical vocalization then, may have evolved through sexual selection, as our prehuman ancestors began to charm potential mates with sound.

Part of what makes this a sonic just-so is the main objection that Gould had with this type of story: Just because a trait is compatible with natural selection doesn't mean that natural selection actually produced the trait in question. Where's the actual evidence that musical history sprung forth as a prehistoric slow jam?

While evolutionary biologists pursued Darwin's line of thinking around the rise of birdsong, his claims about human musicality were left to smolder for over 100 years, until nature selected just the right guy to pick up the torch.

A definitely-not-projecting-his-own-obsessions account of music's evolution through sexual selection

In “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection” (2000), evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller tried to show the receipts for the Darwinian account, claiming that music was “shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display to attract sexual partners.” It's a super-interesting chapter in which Miller claims:

• Singing, dancing and instrumental performance are costly in terms of time and energy and can expose performers to danger, making music unlikely to be a survival adaptation and more likely to be a courtship adaptation.
• Like animal courtship displays, musical performance reveals qualities that are difficult to fake: health, energy, coordination, creativity, memory, and intelligence.
• Public music-making increases after puberty, peaks during young adulthood and declines with age and parenting obligations. (Is this really true, though? A million dad bands want to know.)

So far, so good. Miller definitely made some interesting points. Now it's case study time! Let's go...

Consider Jimi Hendrix, for example. This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination. His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts, did him no survival favours. But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more. Hendrix’s genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation, through the power of attracting opposite-sex admirers.

Oh, dear.

Hey look, I can't peel back the evolutionary strata of Miller's brain, all the way down to the lizard. I don't what kinds of primitive bugaboos and preoccupations lurk in there. But did the white guy evolutionary psychologist have to pick the most famous black dude in a genre commercially constructed as white, and then situate him as some kind of musical missing link, while also poring over Jimi's sexual history and getting into his genes in such an unseemly fashion? Was Jim Morrison unavailable? Or Janis Joplin, for that matter?

But even putting race and gender issues aside, the Hendrix story really sounds just-so, doesn't it? Miller takes an extraordinarily famous performer, assumes his musical talent was genetic (rather than the result of hard work, nurturing, and cultural influence), and uses media-driven celebrity sexual access as evidence for music’s original function.

Oh fuck it, let him continue:

As Darwin realized, music’s aesthetic and emotional power, far from indicating a transcendental origin, point to a sexual-selection origin, where too much is never enough. Our ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, “OK, our music’s good enough, we can stop now,” because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric-Claptons, hominid-Jerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons. The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection’s arms race to impress minds like ours.

It really makes you feel for the ancestral Claptons, Garcias, and Lennons, who apparently weren't packing quite as large an armory in this... uh, race.

But lest we accuse Dr. Miller of doing "politics by other means" or projecting his own preoccupations onto the distant past, rest assured that he is so secure in his own sexual-selection missile stockpile that he co-wrote a book called Mate: Become the Man Women Want (2015).

Also, in 2013, Miller tweeted this gem: "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth." After that went over about as well as you'd expect, he licked his wounds with a 2019 book called Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics & Free Speech.

So yeah, politics by other means, anyone?

Anyway...

What did other evolutionary scientists think of Miller's thesis?

Not so much! Miller provided a testable prediction: that music provides a sexual access advantage. So, someone tested it. In a Swedish twin study—which frankly, sounds pretty hot—Miriam Mosing and colleagues examined whether musical ability actually predicted greater mating success. And (as any number of laptop musicians who performed at Chicago's Empty Bottle in the early 2000s could have told you) it did not!

In fact, the Swedish twin study (I'm sorry, I just wanted to type that again) showed “little support” for sexual selection as an explanation of musical ability.

Other scientific criticisms of music as sexual display include:

• music is not an individualistic male display to begin with
• music serves varied functions across cultures
• there are other, more powerful forms of attraction in operation, making music relatively ineffective in comparison

If some of these sound to you like the kinds of objections cultural scholars might raise, I agree! Looking through the current scientific literature, I see many familiar names from fields like ethnomusicology and cultural studies cited.

As biomusicologist W. Tecumseh Fitch writes in The biology and evolution of music: a comparative perspective, "studies of the biology of music (as of language) are highly interdisciplinary and demand the integration of diverse strands of evidence." According to Fitch's review of the evidence, "no one selective force (e.g., sexual selection) is adequate to explaining all aspects of human music." In fact, he thinks evolutionary questions about music in the distant past are probably an unanswerable dead end.

But that doesn't mean evolutionary science can't enrich our understanding of music and sonic cultures. As Fitch concludes, "a comparative approach to music promises rich dividends for our future understanding of the biology and evolution of music."

In other words, many in science are doing their cultural research. How many of us humanists are doing enough to understand the science of sound?