Evolution Occurs

Here is another debated topic in evolutionary sciences: Is music an adaptation? Personally I think it is not an adaptation, rather it is an evolutionary by-product. In general I see it as a by-product of motor control and coordination systems as well as the speech processing centers of the brain. Any thoughts?

 

A human manafestation of the "music of the speheres"?

A form of empathic/sympathetic communication?

There is rythm to the Universe. From the babbling of a brook to the rotation of the galaxy.

Music is one of the reasons I can't just dimiss the possiblity of god out of hand.

 

Geckopelli I'm not sure what position (if any) you are taking on the issue of whether music is an adaptation.

It is certainly true that one can think up ways in which music can be adaptive, or could have been adaptive in the ancestral environment. One might even note that skilled musicians and dancers tend to have above average reproductive success across cultures and conclude from this that music must have been directly selected for.

But there is still the question of whether it really is an adaptation or not. It is hard to imagine a selection pressure which would select for musical ability. Music doesn't seem like a solution to a problem in the way that aggression, empathy, fear, and other mental capabilities are obviously adaptive solutions.

Rhythm appears to be an integral part of motor coordination and control systems. Sensitivity to the various qualities of sounds (pitch, timbre, etc) are integral parts of speech processing systems. I think music is a by-product of these systems

 

I lean the same way as you, but I can't defend the position, because of this weakness:

Music seems to affect the behavior of other life forms than human. Even plants (positively at that).

That would seem to indicate some very basic association with the evolutionary process. And that leaves room to argue both ways.

 

I can't comment on what you say about music influencing plants. I have heard of this but I haven't searched for the actual studies yet.

However the fact that nonhuman animals respond to music seems to add support to the idea that music is not a direct adaptation. All animals have motor control systems and most have some means of detecting sound waves, so if music is a by-product of motor control and auditory processing then we would expect nonhuman animals to be influenced by music.

 

About plants, the research is less than super ridgid, I'll admit.

But I've been a grower on and off for 35 years and I have actually experimented with the subject. Clones grown without music playing consistently grew slower and smaller than those with music.
----------------
As for animals, something that seems to be a piece of evidence in favor of by-product is the fact that humans have differing taste in music. I wonder if animals do?

 

Music could be a form of language. For example, the Neanderthals couldn't speak so many believe that they used musical intonations to communicate.

 

Then I'm bewildered that the universe was not available to the self-consciousness of homo-sapiens. Maybe it should have been to the self-consciousness of Neanderthal.

 

Seeing that my view is that music is partially a by-product of speech processing systems I find the idea that neanderthals lacked speech but possessed a system of "musical intonation" to be extremely unlikely.

I think language is a precursor to music, and that music could not arise without language.

Also we don't really know when language developed in the hominid line, or how many hominids developed it. Personally I think that the advent of verbal communication happened long before most linguists think. I think that speech arose before biologically modern humans existed.

 

Ok.

I don't think so.

Inncorrect.

Wow.

And what of the differences they share?

This guy is totally lost...

I'm thinking most peopot don't care what you think about them, so feel free to insult anyone you want, just keep it to yourself.

This may be good advice to you.

I believe you have a great misunderstanding of what the first life on Earth most probably was, little more than complex chemical reactions, I also find it funny how you seem to be able to grasp the concept of billions of years and the changes and possibilities that can happen when speaking of such a large amount of time, I would go so far as to say that the only way to understand such stretches of time would be through mathematical computations, but even then we can have little knowledge as to what can happen when dealing with such large number.

It's almost as though you have a vested interest in spreading misinformation, for what reason is anyones guess.

I'm beggining to believe that you have no idea who Barron Munchausen is.

 

Lol.

 

Only one: you are depressing.

 

Why am I depressing? I find evolutionary science to be exhilarating and amazing.

 

"1) Broccolli proves speciation-- it was bred from the mustard plant, but is infertile with the mustard plant."

The claim is that broccoli, cabbage, kale, and cauliflower were bred by man thousands of yrs ago from mustard-like plant is a false assumption. Kale is not morphologically like any of those others, and morphology does not change. There is no mechanism in nature for morphological change. So since kale cannot be of the same lineage, neither should we expect kale to be related to broccoli. Because mustard and broccoli are not of the same morphology, they cannot be related like breeds of dog or hoses are produced from an original stock of dog or horse.

"2) The wide range of vegetables bred from cabbage demonstrates this as well."

None of the varieties man can or ever has bred from cabbage have any mrphological feature cabbage does not. Broccoli is not of the same morphology as cabbage, and cannot be from the same genus or family. Evolutionist have gone way out into spaceland with this perposterous claim. It's so perposterous, it defies what botonists actually have demonstrated for 250 yrs. It's not even close to scientific or true - it's beyond fantasy and contradicts what is known in science of variteis within a kind or family or life..

"3) The existence of Amino Acids in bright nebula proves that inanimate matter spontaneously evolves in the direction of Life."

Amino acids are simply molecules. The odds that one can form under perfect conditions is not surprising. Amino acids comprise protiens. Nature cannot create a protien from scratch the odds are 10^950, which is 1 to a number greater than all of the particles of matter in the observable universe. According to the science of statistical analysis, this is impossible times impossible times impossible. In other words, as far as science is concerned, it is not possible. Nature cannot build the building blocks of life. If life were to be discovered on another planet, it would only demonstrate that life ecxisted there, but not that it evolved there. We see life on earth too, and yet there is not only no evidence of evolution, but mountains of evidence that it not only did not happen, but is impossible.


* the responses here were written by a friend who doesn't visit this site, he saved me some work

 

Yes, thinking up that preposterous post must have been quite a bit of work. Morphology certainly changes, and your statistics are way off because you are calculating the odds of an event that has nothing to do with the origin of life through natural processes.

 

I have no idea what you just said. Other than make a baseless claim that is.

 

That may be overgeneralizing. The existence of Amino Acids in bright nebulae (and meteorites, etc.) proves that inanimate matter can evolve in the direction of amino acids under the right conditions. Amino acids may be the building blocks of proteins, but it would be odd to say that a pile of bricks bricks has evolved in the direction of a house. The amino acids are necessary but hardly sufficient conditions for proteins, and proteins don't automatically happen from them. Amino acids are a long way from the large, specialized molecules such as proteins, that life requires. Amino acids aren't that hard to make--but life?

 

ForestsEchoLaughter you did not provide any evidence for any of the claims that you made. The claim that morphology never changes is so silly that I do not know where to begin. Do you know what the word 'morphology' means in biology?

I'm not a botanist so I can't really argue the point about cabbage speciation but if you would post a peer reviewed scientific journal article detailing why all of the plants which are claimed to have been derived from cabbage are in fact not derived from cabbage I would gladly read it.

Your statistics are completely bogus because what you have presented is the odds of a fully formed protein popping into existence randomly. I don't need to check your math because that scenario has nothing to do with evolutionary theory or the origin of life. The person who calculated that statistic obviously doesn't understand the theory of evolution or the leading concepts about the origin of life.

If you really want to cast doubt on the truth of common ancestry then you must provide an explanation for the following facts:
1. Faunal succession in the fossil record.
2. The divergence of lineages in the fossil record.
3. The presence of hind limb buds in dolphin embryos.
4. The presence of the remnants of hip bones in snakes and whales.
5. The presence of yolk sacks in human embryos as well as the presence of degraded yolk production genes.

 

I'm not sure where ForestEchoLaughter is coming from, but the notion that morphology never changes is a tenet of Creationist dogma denying the possibility of macroevolution. The presentation of statistical calculations showing the extreme improbability of events happening at random and using that as a basis for attacking evolution, as though the theory were saying it happened randomly, is another favorite Creationist tactic.

 

I have one for you. Is consciousness adaptive or is it a "by-product? If it's adaptive, what function does it serve? We know that computers are capable of doing a lot of the same stuff, and most people think computers aren't conscious. By consciousness, I mean the subjective component of experience or self-awareness, our inner life, so to speak. Chalmers calls this the "hard Problem": Why should physical processing be accompanied by a rich inner life? Why aren't we zombies instead? From the standpoint of survival, it doesn't seem to be obvious that our subjective inner life has a function. But from a philosophical/religious standpoint it's all important. Without it, we wouldn't be aware of the wonderful phenomena that give rise to these discussions. Does a tree fall in the forest if nobody's there to hear it? Is the universe a mindbogglingly amazing place if nobody is there to realize it? And yet Stephen Jay Gould tells us that it's kind of a statistical fluke that intelligent life is here at all. And consciousness? What's the point of that?