Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

ION, GENERAL CONCEPTIONS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, MENTAL INDIVIDUALITY. It would be very difficult for any one with even much more knowledge than I possess, to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of these high mental powers. This difficulty arises from the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal; and again, the fact that writers differ to a great extent in the meaning which they attribute to the above terms, causes a further difficulty. If one may judge from various articles which have been published lately, the greatest stress seems to be laid on the supposed entire absence in animals of the power of abstraction, or of forming general concepts. But when a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract; for when he gets nearer his whole manner suddenly changes, if the other dog be a friend. A recent writer remarks, that in all such cases it is a pure assumption to assert that the mental act is not essentially of the same nature in the animal as in man. If either refers what he perceives with his senses to a mental concept, then so do both. (44. Mr. Hookham, in a letter to Prof. Max Muller, in the 'Birmingham News,' May, 1873.) When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi, hi, where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up into any neighbouring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted? It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth. But how can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in the chase? And this would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Buchner (45. 'Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,' French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked, how little can the hardworked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence. It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and selfconsciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; but who can say at what age this occurs in our young children? We see at least that such powers

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ase1887/22/257/22_257_458/_pdf

The descent of man and selection in relation to sex

When the red harvester ant is threatened, nestmates rush to its assistance. The message is a chemical one. Distress is communicated and help summoned by the potential victim ejecting a tiny cocktail of alkanes and terpenoids. Professor E 0 Wilson, who made this discovery, is a distinguished zoologist whose writings have twice been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. His interests extend far beyond entomology, however. Why should human communication be qualitatively different from that of the ant, in being achieved by definable, physicochemical processes? And, if this is the case, surely the same must be true of other social phenomena? Having conceded so much, on what grounds can we exclude other products of human activity such as the social sciences, arts, humanities and ethics? In a mechanistic universe, the whole of human civilization is the ultimate product of the interaction between genes and environment, incredibly complex, as Wilson admits, but susceptible to fundamentally the same analytic techniques as communication in the harvester ant. Consilience (literally, a 'jumping together') is the notion that a common groundwork of explanation applies not only to the sciences but also to the arts, ethics and religion. In his book Consiliencel Wilson applies a combination of broad learning and a style of baroque exuberance to put the case for such a unity of knowledge. Wilson is thus, as he makes clear, a child of the Enlightenment, paying homage to Bacon and Newton but most of all to Condorcet, who trod the same intellectual path (and who came to grief in the Revolution for reasons probably not unrelated to his philosophy). He mourns the triumph at the end of the eighteenth century of revelatory religion fearful of the outcomes of science, and most of all of Romanticism although regrettably overlooking the

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Gait Analysis. An Introduction

Main emphases: European explorers' accounts (from late 15th c. onwards) of non-Western peoples and cultures provided basis for development of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and provided most ethnographic information until development of anthropological fieldwork in late 19th-early 20th c. (see Fieldwork, below). Recent historical and critical work in anthropology and cultural studies has stressed influence of colonialism, but earliest ethnographies were pre-colonial, seeking information as defensive response to invasions by Mongol and Turkish armies, reflecting European weakness rather than hegemonic power. Emphasis shifted during colonial era to European superiority, although early ethnographic writings treated some non-European cultures as potentially equal competitors, or even (as in pre-19th c. writings on China) as more advanced and/or powerful than Europe. Colonial emphasis on acquisition of knowledge, including cultural and musical knowledge, among other spoils of conquest.

The Anthropology of Music

This paper reveals the way in which musical pitch works as a peculiar form of cognition that reflects upon the organization of the surrounding world as perceived by majority of music users within a socio-cultural formation. The evidence from music theory, ethnography, archeology, organology, anthropology, psychoacoustics, and evolutionary biology is plotted against experimental evidence. Much of the methodology for this investigation comes from studies conducted within the territory of the former USSR. To date, this methodology has remained solely confined to Russian speaking scholars. A brief overview of pitch-set theory demonstrates the need to distinguish between vertical and horizontal harmony, laying out the framework for virtual music space that operates according to the perceptual laws of tonal gravity. Brought to life by bifurcation of music and speech, tonal gravity passed through eleven discrete stages of development until the onset of tonality in the seventeenth century. Each stage presents its own method of integration of separate musical tones into an auditory-cognitive unity. The theory of "melodic intonation" is set forth as a counterpart to harmonic theory of chords. Notions of tonality, modality, key, diatonicity, chromaticism, alteration, and modulation are defined in terms of their perception, and categorized according to the way in which they have developed historically. Tonal organization in music, and perspective organization in fine arts are explained as products of the same underlying mental process. Music seems to act as a unique medium of symbolic representation of reality through the concept of pitch. Tonal organization of pitch reflects the culture of thinking, adopted as a standard within a community of music users. Tonal organization might be a naturally formed system of optimizing individual perception of reality within a social group and its immediate environment, setting conventional standards of intellectual and emotional intelligence.

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Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric

This paper presents a new line of inquiry into when and how music as a semiotic system was born. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each contains specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural languages and animal communication. The question of music's origin can therefore be answered by establishing the point in human history at which all eleven expressive aspects might have been abstracted from the instinct-driven primate calls and used to express human psycho-emotional states. Etic analysis of acoustic parameters is the prime means of cross-examination of the typical patterns of expression of the basic emotions in human music versus animal vocal communication. A new method of such analysis is proposed here. Formation of such expressive aspects as meter, tempo, melodic intervals, and articulation can be explained by the influence of bipedal locomotion, breathing cycle, and heartbeat, long before Homo sapiens. However, two aspects, rhythm and melodic contour, most crucial for music as we know it, lack proxies in the Paleolithic lifestyle. The available ethnographic and developmental data leads one to believe that rhythmic and directional patterns of melody became involved in conveying emotion-related information in the process of frequent switching from one call-type to another within the limited repertory of calls. Such calls are usually adopted for the ongoing caretaking of human youngsters and domestic animals. The efficacy of rhythm and pitch contour in affective communication must have been spontaneously discovered in new important cultural activities. The most likely scenario for music to have become fully semiotically functional and to have spread wide enough to avoid extinctions is the formation of cross-specific communication between humans and domesticated animals during the Neolithic demographic explosion and the subsequent cultural revolution. Changes in distance during such communication must have promoted the integration between different expressive aspects and generated the basic musical grammar. The model of such communication can be found in the surviving tradition of Scandinavian pastoral music - kulning. This article discusses the most likely ways in which such music evolved.

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The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music

This is an attempt to describe and explain so-called timbre-based music as a special system of musicking, communication, and psychological and social usage, which along with its corresponding beliefs constitutes a viable alternative to "frequency-based" music. Unfortunately, the current scientific research into music has been skewed almost entirely in favor of the frequency-based music prevalent in the West. Subsequently, whenever samples of timbre-based music attract the attention of Western researchers, these are usually interpreted as "defective" implementations of frequency-based music. The presence of discrete pitch is often regarded as the structural criterion that distinguishes music from non-music. We would like to present evidence to the contrary-in support of the existence of indigenous music systems based on the discretization and patterning of aspects of timbre, rather than pitch. This evidence comes mainly from extensive ethnographic research systematically conducted in eastern European and Asian parts of Russia from the 1890s. It involved the efforts of thousands of specialists and was coordinated by dozens of research institutions, and it has included not just ethnomusicology but linguistics, philology, organology, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and religious, and social studies. Much of the data has not been translated into Western languages. Although some Soviet-era publications were tainted by Marxist ideology, many researchers strove to provide accurate information (despite at times having been prosecuted for their work), and post-1990 research undertook a substantial revision of ideologically compromised concepts. Timbre-based tonal organization (TO) differs from that based on frequency in its personal orientation: musicking here occurs primarily for oneself and/or for close relatives/friends. Collective music-making is rare and exceptional. The foundation of timbre-based music seems to have vocal roots and rests on "personal song"-a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm, timbre, and pitch contour, utilized like a "human voice"-whose sound enables the recognition of a particular individual. The instrumental counterpart of the personalized singing tradition is the jaw harp tradition. The jaw harp is the principal musical instrument for at least 21 ethnicities in Russia, who occupy over half the territory of the country. The evolution of its TO forms the backbone for the development of timbre-based music art. Here, we provide the acoustic, socio-cultural, geographic, and chronological overview of timbre-based music.

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The Overlooked Tradition of "Personal Music" and Its Place in the Evolution of Music.

This paper reveals the way in which musical pitch works as a peculiar form of cognition that reflects upon the organization of the surrounding world as perceived by majority of music users within a socio-cultural formation. Part-1 of this paper described the origin of tonal organization from verbal speech, its progress from indefinite to definite pitch, and the emergence of two main harmonic orders: heptatonic and pentatonic, each characterized by its own method of handling tension at both domains, of tonal and social organization. Part-2, here, completes the line of historic development from Antiquity to seventeenth century. Vast archeological data is used to identify the perception of music structures that tells apart the temple/palace music of urban civilizations and the folk music of village cultures. The "mega-pitch-set" (MPS) organization is found to constitute the principal contribution of a math-based music theory to a new diatonic order. All ramifications for psychology of music are discussed in detail. "Non-octave hypermode" is identified as a peculiar homogenous type of MPS, typical for plainchant. The origin of chromaticism is thoroughly examined as an earmark of "art-music" that opposes earlier forms of folk music. The role of aesthetic emotions in formation of chromatic alteration is defined. The development of chromatic system is traced throughout history, highlighting its modern implementation in "hemiolic modes." The connection between tonal organization in music and spatial organization in pictorial art is established in the Baroque culture, and then tracked back to prehistoric times. Both are shown to present a form of abstraction of environmental topographic schemes, and music is proposed as the primary medium for its cultivation through the concept of pitch. The comparison of stages of tonal organization and typologies of musical texture is used to define the overall course of tonal evolution. Tonal organization of pitch reflects the culture of thinking, adopted as a standard to optimize individual perception of reality within a social group in a way optimal for one's success, thereby setting the conventions of intellectual and emotional intelligence.

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Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2: Ancient to Seventeenth Century.

The model of musilanguage (Brown, 2000, 2017) requires a new musicological term to refer to its texture. Like choral singing, and unlike speech, musilanguage is based on simultaneous vocalization of multiple participants who reproduce the same signal (call) at random time intervals and pitch levels, akin to a wolf “chorus.1” Voiced utterances produce multiple pitches, generating a “jumbled” texture, similar to polyphony and heterophony, but not fully qualifying as such. The term “heterophony” was introduced by Stumpf (1897) to refer to the fusion of sounds whose components retained their singular identity. Stumpf discovered this word in Plato’s Laws (Plato, 2013, p. 203), where it referred to pitch and rhythm discrepancy between the vocals and the lyre performing the same tune. Four years later, Stumpf (1901) reused this term to describe Thai music. He characterized heterophony as the looping of simultaneous melodic paraphrases [Umspielen], where parts generally followed the same melodic contour while differing in detail, so that minute discrepancies would meet again in unison. Adler (1908) conceptualized heterophony as a style alternative to homophony and polyphony, applicable across Siamese, Japanese, Javanese, and Russian musics. He specifically found Russian heterophony to present a paradigm of heterophonic arrangement, designed to make melodic repetition less monotonous and more idiosyncratic for each singer’s voice. The Russian Musical Encyclopedia defines heterophony as a multi-part music generated by the collective performance of the same melody, where parts contain deviations from the principal melodic formula (Mueller, 1973). Such organization is regarded as a general textural type of ornamental, harmonic, and/or polyphonic variation that can complicate classification. Indeed, already in 1911, Stumpf criticized Adler for misapplication of the term (Stumpf and David, 2012). The keynote of heterophony is an ongoing melodic repetition with numerous intermittent variations, which seems to apply to musilanguage chorusing (Brown, 2007). However, such chorusing contains no synchronization, whereas heterophony implies prevalent synchronization of parts. Swan (1943) defined heterophony as “a principal melody improvised simultaneously by several singers, retaining its main outline in each voice, yet showing enough independence to result in places in 2and 3and even 4-part harmony2.” The Grove Dictionary (Cooke, 2001), following Swan’s definition, emphasizes a collective synchronized execution. Although the notation example provided in the Grove article shows a consistent misalignment of 5 parts

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Aleksey Nikolsky

Papers

Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric

The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music

The Overlooked Tradition of "Personal Music" and Its Place in the Evolution of Music.

Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2: Ancient to Seventeenth Century.

Commentary: The 'Musilanguage' Model of Language Evolution.