9. The Music Instinct

9. The Music Instinct
Note:contro pinker (la musica potrebbe sparire senza conseguenze evolutive)evolutionary lag: 50.000lo strano caso dello spettatoredubbi sulla tesi di pinker: 1 la musica è univrsale 2 interspecie 3 ha divrrse funzioni 4 c è da sempre e suprra l evol lag3 funzioni: corteggiamento social bond allenamento al linguaggio

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Where did music come from?
Note:LA DOMANDA

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part of human or paleohuman mating rituals.
Note:PER DARWIN...SCOLLEGATA DALLA LEGGE DEL PIÙ ADATTO...SELEZIONE SESSUALE...QUI DARWIN E WALLACE VENGONO CONFUSI

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a challenge issued by the cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.
Note:LA SFIDA

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“Language is clearly an evolutionary adaptation,”
Note:X PINKER

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have a clear evolutionary purpose.”
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this occurs when evolutionary forces propagate an adaptation for a particular reason,
Note:COS È L ADATTAMENTO

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Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, borrowing the term from architecture. In architecture,
Note:ALTERNATIVA ALL ADATTAMENTO

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There will necessarily be a space between the arches, not because it was planned
Note:SPAZIO TRA GLI ARCHI

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Birds evolved feathers to keep warm, but they coopted the feathers for another purpose—flying.
Note:ESEMPIO

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language is an adaptation and music is its spandrel.
Note:TESI DI PINKER

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it is merely a by-product,

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“Music is auditory cheesecake,”
Note:PIATTO CUCINATO CON GLI AVANZI

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We can eat foods that have no nutritive value and we can have sex without procreating;
Note:ESEMPI

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none of these is adaptive,

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music is simply a pleasure-seeking behavior
Note:MUSICA COME CARAMELLA...EROINA

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“Music,” Pinker lectured us, “pushes buttons for language ability
Note:COME LA CARAMELLA X IL PIACERE DELLO ZUCCHERO

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the motor control system that injects rhythm into the muscles
Note:ESEMPIO DI UNA FUNZIONE

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“music is useless.
Note:DERIVA DALLA NOSTRA CAPACITÀ LINGUISTICA USATA IN MODO IMPROPRIO

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attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction
Note:COSE A CUI NN SERVE

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music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.”
Note:PUÓ SPARIRE DOMANI

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The cosmologist John Barrow said that music has no role in survival of the species, and psychologist Dan Sperber called music “an evolutionary parasite.”
Note:ALTRE LIQUIDAZIONI

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cognitive capacity to process complex sound patterns that vary in pitch and duration,
Note:MUSICA PARASSITARIA DI FACOLTÀ LINGUISTICHE

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Ian Cross of Cambridge University sums up: “For Pinker, Sperber, and Barrow, music exists simply because of the pleasure that it affords; its basis is purely hedonic.”
Note:EDONISMO...E ANCHE UN PÒ PERVERSO

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all of our phenotypic attributes (our appearance, physiological attributes, and some behaviors) are encoded in our genes,
Note:PRIMO ASUNTO EVOL

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The second assumption of evolutionary theory is that there exists between us some natural genetic variability.
Note:SECONDO

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when we mate, our genetic material combines to form a new being, 50 percent
Note:TERZO

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The genes that exist in you today (with the exception of a small number that may have mutated) are those that reproduced successfully in the past.
Note:ESITO

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the idea of sexual selection. Because an organism must reproduce to pass its genes on, qualities that will attract a mate should eventually become encoded in the genome.
Note:UNA SELEZIONE ALTERNATIVA

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Might music play a role in sexual selection? Darwin thought so. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.
Note:ECCO ALLORA L ALYERNATIVA A PINKER

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associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling,
Note:LA MUSICA....COSA DIVENTA

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Darwin believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship,
Note:CORTEGGIAMENTO

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Geoffrey Miller
Note:SOTTO

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Jimi Hendrix had “sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies,
Note:TIPI COOL

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Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, recalls his experience with their big concert tours in the seventies: “I was on my way to love. Always. Whatever road I took,
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for the top rock stars, such as Mick Jagger, physical appearance doesn’t seem to be an issue.
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anyone who could sing and dance was advertising to potential mates his stamina and overall good health, physical and mental.
Note:PUBBLICOTÀ

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advertising that he had enough food and sturdy enough shelter that he could afford to waste valuable time on developing a purely unnecessary skill.
Note:SECONDO SEGNALE...LA CODA

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In contemporary society, we see this with rich people who build elaborate houses or drive hundred-thousand-dollar cars. The sexual selection message is clear: Choose me.
Note:ANALOGIA

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In contemporary society, interest in music also peaks during adolescence, further bolstering the sexual-selection aspects of music.
Note:ALTRO INDIZIO

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dancing in past hunter-gatherer societies was anything like what we observe in contemporary ones, it typically extended for many hours, requiring great aerobic effort.
Note:I VRAVE DEI PRIMITIVI

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Most tribal dancing includes repeated high-stepping, stomping,
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Many mental illnesses are now known to undermine the ability to dance or to perform rhythmically—schizophrenia and Parkinson’s, to name just two—and
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Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness. Improvisation and novelty in a combined music/dance performance would indicate the cognitive flexibility
Note:FLESSIBILITÀ COGNITIVA

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Miller and his colleague Martie Haselton
Note:SOTTO

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while wealth may predict who will make a good dad (for child rearing), creativity may better predict who will furnish the best genes (for child fathering).
Note:PAFRE SOLO PUTATIVO

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The results showed that when they were at their peak fertility, women preferred the creative but poor artist to the not creative but rich man as a short-term mate,
Note:ESPERIMENTO

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Far more women want to sleep with rock stars and athletes than to marry them.
Note:STEREOTIPO

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First, if music was nonadaptive, then music lovers should be at some evolutionary or survival disadvantage. Second, music shouldn’t have been around very long.
Note:SE PINKER AVESSE RAGIONE

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All the available evidence is that music can’t be merely auditory cheesecake;
Note:TESI

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The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag—the
Note:EV LAG

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When we ask about the evolutionary basis for music, it does no good to think about Britney or Bach. We have to think what music was like around fifty thousand years ago.
Note:DI CONSEGUENZA

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But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the
Note:EVOLUZIONE RECENTE...

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Most of us would be shocked if audience members at a symphonic concert got out of their chairs and clapped their hands, whooped, hollered, and danced as was de rigueur at a James Brown concert. But the reaction to James Brown is certainly closer to our true nature.
Note:LA NATURA DELLA MUSICA

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Children often show the reaction that is true to our nature:
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Cross writes that “musical ability cannot be defined solely in terms of productive competence”; virtually every member of our own society is capable of listening to and hence of understanding music.
Note:UNIVERSALE

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facts about music’s ubiquity, history, and anatomy,
Note:CONTRO PINKER...RIASSUNTO

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Additional possibilities have been argued as well. One is social bonding and cohesion.
Note:IPOTESI ALTERNATIVE A PINKER (CHEESKAKE) E DARWIN (SEX SELECTION)

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synchrony,
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Singing around the ancient campfire might have been a way to stay awake, to ward off predators, and to develop social coordination and social cooperation within the group.
Note:AL CAMPO

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evidence for the social-bonding basis of music

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my work with Ursula Bellugi
Note:AUTORI

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(ASD).

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Although some people with ASD play music, and some of them have reached a high level of technical proficiency, they do not report being emotionally moved by music.
Note:GLI AUTISTICI

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they are attracted to the structure of music.
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she finds music “pretty” but that in general, she just “doesn’t get it” or understand why people react to it the way that they do.
Note:TEMPLE GARDIN

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music evolved because it promoted cognitive development. Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech
Note:TERZA IPOTESI

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Because music is a complex activity, Trehub suggests that it may help prepare the developing infant for its mental life ahead. It shares many of the features of speech
Note:L AUTORE

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No human has ever learned language by memorization. Babies don’t simply memorize every word and sentence they’ve ever heard; rather, they learn rules and apply them in perceiving and generating new speech.
Note:OVEREXTENSION...UN MODO CREATIVO DI SBAGLIARE

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This is why we hear young children say, “He goed to the store,”
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intelligent children are more likely to make these mistakes
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The second piece of evidence that children don’t simply memorize language is logical: All of us speak sentences that we’ve never heard before.
Note:IL LINGUAGGIO È GENERATIVO

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Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note to the beginning, end, or middle to generate a new musical phrase.
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Cosmides and Tooby
Note:SOPRA

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Music processing helps infants to prepare for language; it may pave the way to linguistic prosody, even before the child’s developing brain is ready to process phonetics.
Note:ESERCIZIO

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Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement, such as rocking or caressing. This appears to be culturally universal.
Note:MADRE FIGLIO

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by almost all accounts the music of our distant ancestors was heavily rhythmic. Rhythm stirs our bodies. Tonality and melody stir our brains.
Note:LA MUSICA DEI PRIMITIVI

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Contemporary “classical” music is practiced mostly in universities; it is regrettably listened to by almost no one compared to popular music; much of it deconstructs harmony, melody, and rhythm, rendering them all but unrecognizable; in its least accessible form it is a purely intellectual exercise, and save for the rare avant-garde ballet company, no one dances to it either.
Note:LA CLASSICA CONTEMPORANEA...UN ESEMPIO ESTREMO

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A fourth argument for music as an adaptation comes from other species. If we can show that other species use music for similar purposes, this presents a strong evolutionary argument.
Note:QUARTO ARGOMENTO

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Other animal vocalizations are more clearly related to courtship.
Note:DI SOLITO

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Music’s evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists’ criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely audio cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other species.
RIASSUMIAMO I PUNTI ANTIPINKER