Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (26 page)

The results were clear: Children who had previously made music together were significantly more likely to spontaneously help each other. Even in those rare cases when assistance was
not
forthcoming, the music makers were more likely to spontaneously explain why they weren’t helping, implying that they felt a greater obligation or inclination to do so. The researchers suggest that the key is shared involvement in a coordinated task:

We propose that music making, including joint singing and dancing, encourages the participants to keep a constant audiovisual representation of the collective intention and shared goal of vocalizing and moving together in time—thereby effectively satisfying the intrinsic human desire to share emotions, experiences and activities with others.

Music goes far back in human antiquity, including the recent discovery, in southwestern Germany, of ancient flutes from at least 40,000 years ago.
¹⁰
No one can doubt that music has powerful effects on mood and emotion. It is important to distinguish between music as an innate and universal human penchant—what anthropologists identify as a “cross-cultural universal”—and the societally generated specificity of musical forms, from Gregorian chants to rap, from simple lullabies to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Music, in short, is everywhere, although its details vary greatly.

The same is true of the arts generally, and although a group-focusing, coordination-generating function may well be especially intense when it comes to music, it is at least possible that a similar adaptive payoff is associated, to varying degrees, with all of the arts. If cooperation is good for society, then maybe music in particular and the arts in general have been selected for as a way of achieving it.

Another cluster of hypotheses looks at music and the other arts as having evolved as a means of achieving coordination and collaboration within that most intimate social “group,” consisting of mother and infant.
¹¹
The prime mover in this interpretive
enterprise is Ellen Dissanayake, who makes a compelling case that the key driving force has been the mother–infant bond, which in turn facilitates early learning, as well as basic coordination between young child and its primary caretaker, enabling this biologically crucial dyad to maintain “contact” even when not literally touching.

Although the mutual rituals of mother and infant do not occur with the conscious intention of generating cohesion, this universal dyadic dance could be the source—both developmental and evolutionary—of much human artistry. Dissanayake points out that we use a simple word, “ceremony,” to encompass much that is complex and artistic, but as she sees it, this is actually “a one-word term for what is really a collection or assembly of elaborations of words, voices, actions, movements, bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia” that ultimately ramifies into songs, chants, dance, drama, mime, and so forth. Dissanayake’s important ideas in this regard are cogently presented in her book,
Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began
.
¹²

When it comes to mother–infant interaction, the details of
what
is communicated are probably less important than the fact of communication itself, more accurately, maintaining lines of communication. To be sure, not only are lullabies universal, but there is a predictable pulse, rhythm, and pitch employed by adults worldwide when interacting with infants. Perhaps, as one researcher has put it, “the melody is the message.”
¹³
Once established in the mother–infant dyad, it could have ramified to the rest of society.

For Kirschner and Tomasello, the most important proximate mechanism promoting the evolution of music is what they call “shared intentionality,” which operates via a collective sense of having moved and created together. Note that the resulting “creation” need not be a physical object; making music together can do quite nicely. Kirschner and Tomasello argue that music-making children “made the intuitive decision to help the other child because they felt immediate empathic concern with the peer’s misfortune” when she began to lose her marbles. Absent the “shared intentionality” of singing and dancing, such empathic concern was diminished.

Music has long been highly functional in work situations, where it enables greater coordination among the participants, hence the
proliferation of songs in which people aren’t just subtly encouraged to cooperate—the kind of unconscious motivated altruism revealed among children by Kirschner and Tomasello—but also encouraged to be directly functional in adult work situations. Chain-gang songs from the American South motivate participants to pull, push, pound with a hammer, and so forth, and ethnomusicologists have documented similar coordinative singing around the globe when it comes to threshing wheat, pounding cassava, grinding corn, etc. Any doubters might want to listen (on YouTube, for example) to a Russian classic,
The Song of the Volga Boatmen
(“Yo-ho,
heave
-ho; Yo-ho,
heave
-ho …”). It is almost impossible to refrain from pulling an imaginary rope at the powerful intonation of “heave.”

A similar process may well have helped coordinate and motivate our ancestors preparing for a hunt or for combat. Think about marching songs and chants and of the little-known Dutchman, Maurice of Nassau, prince of Orange (1567–1625). Maurice, one of the most important innovators in military science, originated the close-order drill. More than 400 years after he introduced this technique, it still permeates basic training, worldwide. The sight of soldiers marching—and sometimes singing and chanting—in unison may seem an almost comical anachronism given today’s high-tech military technology, but as Maurice first codified it (and before him, innumerable tribal war leaders may well have intuited), shared rhythmic sound and movement generates the kind of de-individuated coordination that evidently pays dividends. “When a group of men move their arm and leg muscles in unison for prolonged periods of time,” writes the noted historian William McNeill,

a primitive and very powerful social bond wells up among them. This probably results from the fact that movement of the big muscles in unison rouses echoes of the most primitive level of sociality known to humankind. … Military drill, as developed by Maurice of Nassau and thousands of European drillmasters after him, tapped into this primitive reservoir of sociality directly. Drill, dull and repetitious though it may seem, readily welded a miscellaneous collection of men, recruited often from the dregs of civil society, into a coherent community, obedient to orders even in extreme situations when life and limb were in obvious and immediate jeopardy.
¹⁴

In a subsequent treatise,
Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History,
McNeill expanded on this theme, albeit without explicitly noting its evolutionary dimension.
¹⁵
McNeill pointed out as well how “dance and drill” help to achieve and emphasize group identity, a phenomenon that also predominates as much in nonmilitary contexts. Consider the extent to which teenagers and young adults in particular identify themselves by their particular musical preferences.

It probably isn’t coincidental that on September 12, 2001, the politically diverse and ideologically disunited membership of the US Congress—wishing to show solidarity in the face of a national tragedy—gathered on the steps of the US Capitol and sang
God Bless America
. Together.

Interestingly, there is considerable evidence from research in social psychology that music making itself may be less important than cooperation in
any
shared enterprise. Eating together, for example, also creates a bond, which is one reason why “breaking bread” with a stranger is often considered an especially important ritual among many cultures. We might expect a similar effect from digging a ditch, building a wall, and so forth. One of the most renowned demonstrations in social psychology, the so-called robber’s cave experiment, artificially generated an alarmingly high degree of animosity among 12-year-old boys at a summer camp by designating them as members of different, competing groups, the “Eagles” and the “Rattlers.” At one point, mutual antagonism became so great that it was nearly decided to terminate the experiment prematurely.

The researchers found, however, that they could essentially eliminate the between-group conflict by introducing a superordi-nate goal that could only be achieved by Eagles and Rattlers working together: specifically, pushing a tanker truck up a hill (without which, it was claimed, the camp would have no water). The social atmosphere was so changed after this intervention that the boys unanimously voted to return home in the same bus.
¹⁶

There have been other, related suggestions, such as the possibility that music in particular emerged as a display signal, by which individuals chorused together and thereby advertised the strength of their coalition, indicating not only their numbers but also the degree of their commitment.
¹⁷
Another hypothesis, similar
although not identical, is that music making was less important as a means of achieving internal cohesion within a group than as a way of displaying their unity to competing groups.
¹⁸

Among other potential proximate contributors to the appeal of the arts in general—and perhaps of music in particular—a notable one is the so-called chameleon effect, based on the widespread power of unconscious mimicry.
¹⁹
Consider, for example, how often people find themselves unintentionally mimicking each other’s physical postures while talking.

These hypotheses, with their various versions of cohesion/coordination/commitment, all imply a degree of group benefit, and therefore, each is subject to the same concerns described earlier with regard to possible group-beneficial aspects of religion. As we have seen, for example, group benefits are vulnerable to cheating (e.g., someone might sing lustily, but not actually participate in dangerous intergroup competition if push came to shove). If so, then the signal itself wouldn’t be entirely reliable and might not be taken seriously by the intended audience: “Sure, these guys can sing up a storm, but maybe their bark is worse than their bite.” Nonetheless, it is hard—even downright foolish—to deny the role of art in generating social solidarity.

Any such hypothesis faces the same problem as the social hypothesis described earlier for homosexuality, namely, the difficulty of group selection. But once again, even though group selection has a deservedly bad reputation when it comes to animals, it just might apply to the human case with respect to the arts and—as we’ll soon see—perhaps also to religion.

One of the most renowned essays by British philosopher Isaiah Berlin was titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” It was an elaboration of the following fragment attributed to Archilochus, an ancient Greek poet: “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Archilochus, in turn, was writing about the difference between multifaceted, culturally sophisticated Athens (the fox) and Sparta, a single-minded, military power. It should not be lost on those of us seeking to understand the
evolutionary origin of the arts that Sparta, not Athens, won the Peloponnesian War, largely because of its hedgehoglike, single-minded focus on military success. Hence, we ought not denigrate the potential value of anything that contributes to social cohesion and coordination.

On the other hand, it is Athens—not Sparta—that comes to mind when we consider artistic creativity, which seems not to augur well for the arts as generating hedgehoggy social coordination. Moreover, at least in modern societies, the arts in general and music in particular serve many functions other than competition and facilitation of war. But this doesn’t negate the prospect that they might have initially evolved in a group-oriented and possibly competitive context or, at least, by virtue of their ability to convey benefits to society as a whole.

Since the hypothesis of group coordination came up when considering religion, just as it has now emerged for art, it is reasonable to ask which came first, art or religion? This may well be a foolish question, since it can be answered, with equal plausibility, either way. Brian Boyd argues that art came first, but this may well simply reflect the bias of a scholar who has devoted himself to the study of art (in Boyd’s case, fiction). A scholar of religion would likely see her special research interest as having been primary, arguing perhaps that in the grip of religious ecstasy, or motivated by feelings of divine awe and righteous enthusiasm, people proceeded to create great art.

Boyd maintains that “religion needs art as a precursor.” Not necessarily. Maybe art needs religion as a precursor, via group identification. “Religion,” writes Boyd, “depends on the power of story.” Indeed it does. But maybe storytelling, along with visual art, music, dance, etc., began as an effort to give voice to “spiritual” feelings!

At the same time, a possible payoff via coordination and collaboration blurs the distinction between the evolutionary origin of religion and of the arts in general, and of music as well. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing: Maybe religion and the arts do in fact share an adaptive payoff in precisely this regard. After all, religions worldwide are suffused with artistic creation: notably music, dance, poetry, and often architecture, sculpture, and painting. Defenders of religion often point, in fact, to their glorious artistic
productions, from the music of Bach to the dome of the Sistine Chapel or the Hagia Sophia.

The social coordination hypothesis—whether narrowly interpreted to derive only from mother–infant interaction or seen more broadly, associated with social coordination among adults—does not preclude the possibility that music and dance in particular could have developed initially as an incidental, nonadaptive byproduct of the human mind (whether cheesecake or spandrel) but was then subsequently taken over for other, more explicitly adaptive functions. Here is a metaphor: Throughout the United States, and especially since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, there has been a proliferation of street-corner ramps, intended to permit wheelchairs to navigate smoothly between sidewalk and road surface. These sidewalk cuts are also used by skateboarders and bicyclists, probably more often than by people in wheelchairs, although this was not the original “adaptive” purpose of these ramps. Maybe the arts are sidewalk cuts of the human mind, originally produced for one purpose but then co-opted for another.