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| Cover of NRC Cultureel Supplement. |
It was Darwin’s hunch: music, as widespread as it is in our human culture, could well be a result of
sexual selection, one of the two selection mechanisms he proposed to be at the basis of our evolution (the other being
natural selection).
Today an
article by Wim Köhler appeared in the Dutch newspaper NRC elaborating on this idea: the potential evolutionary advantage of ‘
mooizingers’ - those who perform well musically.
Music as a result of sexual selection has been adapted by psychologist Geoffrey Miller in his often cited book
The Mating Mind, in which he suggests music to be one of the many social and cultural behaviors that we use to impress the opposite sex. At first it seems convincing idea…
However, there is a lot to bring in against this hypothesis (see earlier
blogs). The most striking being simply the absence of empirical evidence! (The only evidence that Miller brought forward was the amount of offspring Jimi Hendrix produced - officially three!?)
Cognitive biologist Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna University) and his colleagues recently designed an experiment to put the
sexual selection hypothesis to the test: does the ability to produce complex musical sounds reflect qualities that are relevant in mate choice contexts, supporting the idea of music to be functionally analogous to the sexually-selected acoustic displays of some animals, such as songbirds? If this hypothesis is correct, women may be expected to show heightened preferences for more complex music when they are most fertile -- was the reasoning of the Vienna research team.
To to test this hypothesis the Vienna team used computer-generated musical pieces and ovulation predictor kits. The researchers found that women prefer more complex music in general, but they found no evidence that their preference for more complex music increased around ovulation. As such these findings are
not consistent with the hypothesis that a heightened preference/bias in women for more complex music around ovulation could have played a role in the evolution of music.
More empirical research is needed of course, but for the time being and considering the empirical evidence that is available, there is no study, as yet, that supports the
sexual selection hypothesis for music.
Charlton, Benjamin D., Filippi, Piera, & Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2012). Do Women Prefer More Complex Music around Ovulation? PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035626
Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects Topics in Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01210.x
