Catch-up service:
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
One tip on reading the main piece this week: don’t skip the footnotes. Afterwards, in the Rattle Bag this week: crunch time for Burnham; George Eliot sees the future; evidence that gaming is good for us; why robotics is hard; some amazing Paul Simon content…and more.
A group of hunter-gatherers are gathered around a fire at night after a gruelling but successful hunt. As they are butchering the meat and tending the fire, somebody picks up on the rhythmic repetition of sounds and starts calling out or humming along with it. Others join in. Eventually the whole group is clapping and stomping and chanting to the same beat while somebody goes crazy on a bone flute. Yes, it’s dance night on the Palaeolithic savannah.
Why did prehistoric hunter-gatherers do this? Why do we still do this? Why has every generation of our species danced, in almost every society ever formed?
The obvious answer is that it makes us feel good. But academics who study the evolution of human musicality offer a more sophisticated explanation. Those hunter-gatherers were engaged in social bonding. Moving in time with others - “entrainment” - would have helped to bind the group together. That made it more cohesive. More cohesive groups were better at cooperating in self-defence, at sharing resources and raising children. Those groups were more likely to survive - and so natural selection, by way of culture, produced humans who are biologically predisposed to dance.
The anthropologist Manvir Singh is not convinced by this story. He points to a basic problem with it. If the urge to dance to music in a group were a biologically evolved trait, we should expect there to be some specialised machinery for it in the brain. But after decades of research into the neuroscience of musicality nobody has identified one. There is no “enjoy dancing module” as distinct from other mental faculties.
What has been established is that is our capacity to feel a beat and move with it overlaps almost entirely with our capacity for language. Actually, not for language itself, but for what precedes it: “vocal learning” - the ability to hear a sound and reproduce it accurately, which is essential to language acquisition. Just as other animals do not speak, neither do they dance. We’ve never seen bears dancing, or chimpanzees, or horses (OK maybe the occasional horse but not with other horses). In fact, only one animal has been observed spontaneously entraining to a musical beat: the parrot.
Why might this be? The most plausible theory is that in order to learn to speak, you need a brain which rewards you for correctly timing and reproducing sequences of sound. If we feel good when we do that, we will persist, which makes us more likely to acquire this evolutionarily advantageous skill. The thing is, this reward circuitry doesn’t distinguish between speech or drumbeat. It just rewards accurate temporal prediction and reproduction of any sequence of sounds. When you hear a rhythmic beat, the circuitry that helped you learn language gets hyper-stimulated, which makes you feel great. In other words, the pleasure of rhythmic music is a happy side-effect of our adaptation for language.
If this is right, then our first, seemingly naive answer to the question of why we dance is actually the correct one. We don’t dance in order to become more cooperative social actors. We dance because it makes us feel good.
The paper in which Manvir Singh expounds this idea isn’t just about dancing. It’s about everything - a grand theory of human cultural evolution. The question he sets out to answer is why human societies, all over the world and throughout the history of our species, keep independently inventing their own versions of certain cultural traditions and practices. His list includes dance songs and lullabies, shamanism, religion, justice systems, hero narratives, and what he calls “corporate groups”, which refers to clans, gangs, clubs and so on. All of these traditions have turned up, in different forms, pretty much everywhere, at all times.
Singh is not the first to ask why this should be. In 1971, the anthropologist Robin Fox (father of Kate Fox, author of Watching The English) proposed a thought experiment. Imagine that a new society with a cultural blank slate is established on a remote island, far from contact with other humans. The inhabitants successfully survive and breed for many generations, maintaining a stable population. After a thousand years, an anthropologist is sent to study this society. What should they expect to find?
Fox argued that it would have instantly recognisable institutions and traditions: marriage, property, dancing, myths, justice systems, supernatural beliefs. “Without any exposure to cultural traditions our tribe would develop very specific and highly complex patterns of behaviour, and probably very quickly – within a matter of a few generations, once they had developed a language.”
Seventy-five years before, Franz Boas, the father of twentieth century anthropology, made a similar point: “human society has grown and developed everywhere in such a manner that its forms, its opinions and its actions have many fundamental traits in common.” This implies the existence of hidden laws which have governed the development of societies throughout human history. “Many attempts have been made to discover the causes which have led to the formation of ideas ‘that develop with iron necessity wherever man lives,” he wrote. But none had succeeded. He called this “the most difficult problem of anthropology”.
Since then there have been many attempts to solve it. Crudely speaking, answers to the Boas-Fox question have fallen into two camps, the biological and the cultural. The biologists assume that if a practice is shared everywhere then it must be in our genes - a trait that natural selection has built into us directly, like a fear of snakes. The culturalists argue that practices like dancing and marriage spread through group selection - over thousands of years, groups which adopted them survived and thrived while groups which didn’t dwindled. These universal practices evolve at the group level, ‘blindly’. In fact, both of these camps agree that culture is something that happens to people, shaped by a process none of them comprehend.
In his paper, Singh proposes a different, deceptively simple answer, which puts the individual back at the heart of cultural evolution.
