Music and Cheesecake

What Does Music Do for Us? This question may strike you as puzzling or annoying or both. After all, almost every human being enjoys music, at least some kinds of music. Isn’t that sufficient to explain its presence in our lives? Perhaps not, as this newsletter will discuss. Let us remember first that music is not a simple thing, neither in its production or its effects on human beings; but let us call the collective set of abilities to make music and to enjoy it, “musicality”.

Perhaps, however, the question will seem less silly if slightly rephrased: Does musicality actually benefit human beings in one or more ways, beyond simply pleasing us, quite possibly in ways we are unaware of? If it does not, why then is it a near-universal human trait? This is an evolutionary question. Apart from song birds and a handful of other bird species, plus a very small number of mammals that produce some form of “song”¹, music-making and music-enjoyment seem to be distinctive to our species of all of the millions of animal species in our world. Why us, after all? Was there a special benefit that favoured music-making in humans, and was therefore selected in evolution, or is it just an accidental by-product of some other trait that was itself directly selected?

We return to the by-product idea in a moment but first let us consider an example of a possible benefit of music making that might have been selected for. This idea was the first proposed evolutionary explanation for music and was made by Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology. His curiosity and interests were immensely wide-ranging and he had the unusual ability to frame questions that had been little considered before but, once stated, seemed obvious things to wonder about. One of them was: what made us music-loving animals? Unsurprisingly, he thought that musicality was beneficial to humans and that the ability to make and enjoy music had been a selected property. The kind of selection he envisaged as the agent of change, however, was not natural selection, which promotes general adaptiveness and survival, but the kind he named “sexual selection”.  This is the process by which some trait increased one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex and therefore increased the odds of successfully mating. The idea was completely original to Darwin and, at first, he resisted it but as the evidence for such traits built up, he accepted it as a general feature of sexually-reproducing animals. In this view, the ability to make music was such a trait, that men who made beautiful music, and here he favoured singing as the original form, would be more likely to win the favour of females than those men who could not. He proposed this idea in two of his books, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals (1872). (For “man” in both titles, read “humans”.)². This idea, of sexual selection by females in particular, existed under a cloud for nearly five decades, disbelieved by most biologists during that period, but was later championed by Ronald Fisher, one of the early great 20th century geneticists and has since been validated.

That was one possible explanation of what musicality does for us and we will return to some of the others in a moment. But first, let us look at the alternative idea: that musicality is a purely accidental by-product of other properties that had been selected, via natural selection. Those properties could well have been language and speech and the various cognitive properties distinctive to humans and necessary for language and speech. One can give a precise year for the most influential statement of this idea, 1997, when it was proposed in the book How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker, a leading cognitive psychologist and writer. He proposed that the enjoyment of music was, to use a phrase that became notorious, “auditory cheesecake”, namely something that might have been deeply enjoyable but had no real value, in terms of aiding survival. After all, no one is known to have died from or had fewer children as a result of being deprived of cheesecake. In this view, the innumerable ways of making music, both singing and instrumental forms of music-making, found in human societies from around the world and have been for many thousands of years, are the equivalent of efforts to make lots of cheesecake, an agreeable but inessential past-time.

Although it is always hard to track the influence of ideas, it seems likely that Pinker’s idea provided a big stimulus to thinking about the question of the origins of music. Not because it was acclaimed but the reverse, that it made people angry or at least a bit irritated, especially, one suspects, those who love music and did not enjoy seeing that love reduced to the level of enjoying a dessert. From the early 2000s on, research into and thinking about the origins of musicality has expanded tremendously and seems to be a field of far livelier interest and debate than it was before Pinker’s notorious pronouncement. While there is yet no general consensus let alone a definitive answer to the question of how and why musicality evolved in humans, the question is widely acknowledged to be of strong interest.

There are two major aspects to it that must be considered. The first concerns music’s expressiveness, especially of feelings and emotions, and the second emphasizes the multiple social consequences of that expressiveness. In considering  the value or utility of these aspects, please keep two points in mind. First, most music is produced by one or more humans with one or more listeners in mind. Of course, some people sing in the shower just for their own enjoyment but most music is produced with one or more other listeners in mind, including practice sessions when the musician is preparing to perform eventually. The intention behind most music production is communicative, like language. The second general aspect that must not be forgotten – though it seems so obvious as not to need mentioning – is that the production of music is heavily influenced by culture. Music production and consumption is essentially a universal human trait but it is vastly different between different cultures, whether as singing or as produced by instruments or a combination of both. Hence, while the desire to produce music is essentially universal, the forms of that music are tremendously diverse, as influenced by local culture and over time, since invariably music evolves in specific places, though at different rates to be sure.

This combination of universal features and diversity of expression is, of course, not unique to music. As an example, take language, whose production is both universal and distinctive to humans, yet obviously shaped by culture, as seen in the more than the 6000 to 7000 languages used on Earth today. Another such trait is facial expressions. As shown by Darwin, and confirmed by others, there are six essentially universal human expressions that are seen in all human cultures. These convey: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, puzzlement, and fear. Yet these expressions are often subtly different between different cultures, for example in the ways the eyes and the mouth differ in the same expressions in different cultures. Similarly, with musicality, the combination of universal elements and differences in local forms of production need to be explained if one is going to try to explain what it is “for”.

In effect, Pinker was arguing that making and enjoying music is a “neutral” trait. (In this newsletter, we have encountered this idea but in a different context.) This adjective essentially denotes a biological property that neither helps nor diminishes the possibility of survival, or reproducing, of the individual showing it. For Pinker’s hypothesis, it made sense in terms of where he was coming from, the field of evolutionary psychology. This was a new field in the 1980s and 1990s and very influential at the time. Its central premise was that the distinctive aspects of human nature, as we know it today, evolved during the rigours of the ice ages, which took place during the Pleistocene (currently dated from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, as the last ice age ended). Furthermore, it held that the important traits had been selected via the struggles to survive during that period and under those conditions. The basic premise of 20th century evolutionary biology about which traits would be favoured by natural selection were those that conveyed some direct survival advantage to an individual, promoting his or her chances to reproduce. From that viewpoint, musicality indeed looks like a luxury. Pinker saw it as an inadvertent by-product of one or more cognitive traits that had been actively selected, in particular, probably those involved in language production, a key focus of his earlier work.

Where might this evolutionary argument have gone wrong? I would name three possibilities. The first is that it neglects those traits that promote social bonding. Traditional 20th century evolutionary biology, even before evolutionary psychology came along, long neglected them: social bonding is an indirect assist to survival and furthermore, no mathematics for such indirect effects had been developed in 20th century population genetics. Nevertheless, we can be fairly confident that activities that promote social cohesion in groups must aid the survival of the individuals in those groups. Is it really an accident that hunter-gatherers always lived and worked in small groups, and probably have done so since the beginnings of our genus Homo rather than as Robinson Crusoe-type loners? Music, we know, from countless observations of peoples in disparate cultures from around the world and for thousands of years, is a powerful agent of social cohesion, particularly with instrumental music and group dancing.

The second argument against Pinker’s idea is the very universality of musicality. A neutral trait that was a universal trait in a species is certainly a theoretical possibility but, in general, traits that are truly without value tend to die out. The reason is that all biological traits tend to require some energy and spending energy on something that does not yield some return in chances of survival is wasteful. Now, think of the energy involved in making and performing music, again a universal feature of music. That musicality is found in humans everywhere and that new forms of music are constantly being developed are not expected for an energetically expensive trait that had no realvalue. It is quite likely that by the 22nd or 23rd century, cheesecake will no longer be a popular dessert, as fashions in food change. But it is most unlikely that the making and enjoyment of music will have died out by then.

The third argument against Pinker’s idea has to do with neural circuitry. Musical enjoyment may well have been a development from our language-production capacity (though the reverse, that musical simple language came first, as argued by Darwin, is also possible). Yet, we now know that it involves some distinct neural circuitry, separate from that involved in producing language and speech. And this fact ties into the considerations of energy expense noted above. Neural circuitry is expensive in those terms: the human brain, large as it, is only about 2% of a human’s body weight but consumes 20% of the energy we spend each day. Hence, neural circuitry that seems to be devoted to something special, in this case, the enjoyment of music, is almost certainly earning its keep by providing something that we need, something beyond a mere pleasurable experience.

Most questions of evolutionary history deal with events long in the past, which, by that very fact, make them impossible to answer definitively. The origins of human musicality are certainly in that category. Yet, unquestionably, we understand more about this matter than when Darwin opened up the debate in the early 1870s. In this article, I have been rather hard on Stephen Pinker’s idea but I believe it was valuable. Often, the most useful scientific ideas are not ones that were right but which were provocative and stimulated new lines of thinking, as his undoubtedly did.

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Supplementary reading

There is now a very large amount of work on the question of “why are humans music-loving creatures?” and, correspondingly, numerous articles. What follows are just a few that I feel are interesting and found valuable.

1. Carroll, J. (1998). Stephen Pinker’s cheesecake for the mind. Philosophy and Literature 22: 478-485.
   A slim, early critique of Pinker’s idea about music from a humanist’s perspective.

2. Peretz, I. (2006). The nature of music from a biological perspective. Cognition 100: 1-32.
   An early helpful broad survey of the possible biological functions of musicality, particularly its underlying neurobiology, as opposed to seeing music in exclusive terms as a cultural product.

3. Fitch, W.T. (2006). The biology and evolution of music: a comparative perspective. Cognition 100: 173-215.
   A valuable overview of the same topic in the same volume of Cognition as Peretz’ article but with different emphases.

4. Benitez-Burraco, A., Nikolsky,  A. (2023). The (co)evolution of language and music under human self-domestication. Human Nature 34: 229-275.
   A thought-provoking account of the relationships between language and music as means of communication and a scenario as to how music making might have evolved in humans.

5. Thorp, H.H. (2024). Music and the Mind. Science 383: 1271.
   A recent editorial in America’s top scientific journal about an unusual collaboration between one of America’s foremost geneticists, Francis Collins, and one of the world’s great opera singers, Renée Fleming, concerning musicality, neuroscience and health.

1. Two mammals that sing are a South American rodent, Alston’s Singing Mouse, and the New Guinea Singing Dog. The function of their music is clearly communicative. For the mouse, it has been demonstrated to mark out territory and warn off other males but it also elicits responses in the females. The New Guinea Singing Dog has a melodious howl and sometimes several cooperate in a “chorus”. Whether the animals themselves respond to their production and hearing of their own music with human-type enjoyment is, of course, unknown. Many frogs, too, of course, engage in vocalizations that have a musical element though, again, whether they experience them as “music” is unknown.

2. Darwin’s idea has been updated and amplified in a book by Stephen Mithen (2005), The Singing Neanderthal: the origins of music, language and study. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.