ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences2021
Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality.
Article in The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Music as a social instrument: a brief historical and conceptual perspective.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- Rhythmic Roots: The Adaptive Functions of Vocal Isochrony and Its Role in Human Music and Language Evolution.Psihologijske teme = Psychological themes = Psychological topics · 2025Article
- Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.Science advances · 2024Article
- Love songs and serenades: a theoretical review of music and romantic relationships.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Music production and its role in coalition signaling during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Vocal imprecision as a universal constraint on the structure of musical scales.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminologies such as "byproduct" and "exaptation"). We discuss the proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.