“As far as biological cause and effect are
concerned, music is useless.” says Steven Pinker. Nonetheless, most
theories attempting to explain the origins of music seek biological
explanations, or assume that music is an adaptation. Others, such as
Geoffrey Miller’s, argue that music and art are adaptive displays
evolved by sexual selection. By contrast, memetics suggests that
music could be useless from a biological point of view. It might
even be worse than useless; it might be a positive burden, like a
parasite.
Memetic theory implies that the turning point
in human evolution was the advent of imitation because this created
a new replicator (memes) which then evolved using humans as
replication machinery. Among these memes were the sounds, and
patterns of sounds, that people could make and imitate. These
competed to be replicated, with some succeeding for biological
reasons, while others succeeded for quite different reasons, even
while imposing a cost on the organism. Regardless of the reasons for
success, the winning memes would change the environment for
biological selection. Arguably those people who were best at copying
the currently successful memes would have an advantage and therefore
spread genes facilitating the copying of those kinds of memes. This
process of memetic drive entails an arms race in which the direction
taken by memetic evolution influences that taken by biological
evolution. If this is right it means that human brains were designed
to be musical by the pressure of the music itself. In that way
musical memes really did change our minds.
