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Reasons for Music In the History of Human Evolution
This would also help account for the use of music in courtship, as both emotional and social communication. As Dissanayake points out:
In humans, love songs and courtship speech use childish words and refer to childish things to create and display intimacy, for example, ... popular songs that express the [sentiment] ... “Baby, I love you.”
When a guy sings lyrics using words such as “baby,” and “mama,” he doesn’t realize how literal the lyrics are—an adult version of motherese, the musical mother-infant communication system.
(By the way, this has nothing to do with Freud’s weird, unsupported hypotheses. While on the mark about each person having an active unconscious mind, Freud’s bizarre theory of child psychosexual development, complete with Oedipus complex, Electra complex, phallic stage, and so on, amounts to fanciful hokum.)
Fisher’s theory of runaway sexual selection may best explain encephalization in humans. Females select the smartest, most capable males to mate with. Their progeny, both male and female, become smarter and more capable over time. Women make ever-escalating demands for smart, capable mates. Men adapt by becoming even smarter and more capable (actually a courtship display). A feedback loop. Over a couple of million years, the cortex gets larger in both sexes.
If this explains encephalization in humans, then the human brain is the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail, with human males responding to human females’ obsession with brilliance by evolving more ways to display mental prowess, one of those ways—a major one—being music.
A final word on the “what-who-where-when-why” of music, from one of the greatest investigator-songwriters of all time...
In search of love and music, my whole life has been Illumination, corruption, and diving, diving, diving, diving Diving down to pick up on Every shiny thing Just like that black crow flying In a blue sky