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1.5Why Is There Such a Thing as Music? 1.5.1 Darwinian Evolution and the Importance of Music
I don’t like nature. It’s big plants eating little plants, small fish being eaten by big fish, big animals eating each other ... It’s like an enormous restaurant.
Music is important because the human capacity to create and appreciate music evolved to help our species survive and reproduce. If the brain's music adaptation did not have those advantages, it would have died out long ago.
Darwin wrote a number of landmark books identifying and describing natural selection, sexual selection, and other aspects of evolution, including adaptations such as the emotions and the capacity to create and appreciate the value of music.
Darwinian evolution is the most important theory in all of biology. Voluminous evidence from modern science shows that Darwin got it right, despite having no knowledge of DNA or genes. Darwin discovered that life evolves in distinct lines, with each species on its own individual twig of an ever-widening bush, each species descended from a common ancestor, but destined never to meet. (However, at the bacteria level some evidence indicates “gene-swapping” goes on between unrelated organisms.) Humans did not “descend from apes,” and chimpanzees will never evolve into humans.