No progress since Darwin and Spencer?

Darwin and Spencer.

Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo open their recent Commentary in Science, by asserting that, because no fossil or archaeological record of early music-making exists, modern musicality researchers “rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time.” 

This characterization is inaccurate. 

The evolution of musicality can be reconstructed using methods from comparative biology, genetics, and cross-cultural analyses, empirical domains that were unavailable to Darwin and Spencer. 

Over the past twenty years, musicality research has shown that virtually all humans have a natural capacity for music (1, 2), comparable to our innate capacity for language. Examples include beat processing in human newborns (3), species-specific precursors of both rhythmic and pitch processing (4, 5), and showing cross-cultural ‘universals’ in the structural aspects of human music (6–8), suggesting a biological basis. Additionally, recent neuroscientific findings indicate that humans process speech and music through distinct — and possibly independently evolved — neural pathways (9). Together, these findings constitute a robust empirical foundation rather than conjecture and have substantially reshaped our understanding of musicality. 

While trained tapping in macaques (10)—as discussed in Ghazanfar and Steingo’s Perspective—addresses only one subcomponent of musicality, it nonetheless offers a valuable window into its evolution, particularly within the framework of the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis (11). This hypothesis proposes that beat perception and synchronization emerged through incremental increases in the connection between cortical and subcortical motor planning regions. Probing beat perception and isochrony perception in animals is still in its infancy, but it appears, at least within the primate lineage, that beat perception has evolved gradually, peaking in humans and present only with some limitations in chimpanzees and other non-human primates (12, 13). 

Lastly, the relevant object of inquiry here is not music per se, but musicality. For this reason, Ghazanfar and Steingo’s analogy comparing the study of music evolution to ‘human bike evolution’ is unhelpful. Riding a bike requires explicit training even in humans, whereas moving to a musical beat emerges spontaneously and effortlessly, often before the onset of language. This spontaneity is precisely what places beat perception so prominently within musicality research. In other primates, beat perception is not effortless but can be acquired through training, suggesting that for them it is analogous to bike riding in humans. As the authors note, studying trained abilities can nevertheless reveal the basic processes underlying those abilities. More generally, both spontaneous and trained behaviors in animals offer complementary insights into their evolutionary capacities: humans spontaneously acquire speech but can be trained to imitate bird calls, indicating a specialized drive for conspecific communication alongside a broader capacity for vocal imitation. Similarly, non-human primates possess timing and pattern-detection abilities that may form the evolutionary substrate from which human beat induction emerged. Overall, comparative research across cultures and across species provides a powerful framework for uncovering the biological foundations and evolutionary history of musicality. 

As a result, investigating the origins of musicality has become increasingly feasible. What was once a largely speculative corner of musicology has developed into a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field, rich with compelling new research questions.  

Published as eLetter in Science on December 9, 2025; Written by Henkjan Honing - University of Amsterdam, NL; W. Tecumseh Fitch - University of Vienna, AT; Marisa Hoeschele - Austrian Academy of Sciences, AT; Hugo Merchant - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX  

 

References

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