Evolution and Music

Some weeks ago, I posted an article called, Evolution and Marriage. The basis for that article and this is reading various histories that assume Darwinian progression in every aspect of human existence. In that article, I pointed out that if you hold a Darwinian/Materialist point of view, the notion of gay marriage is just one other step or option of human possibility. There is no standard to evaluate right and wrong in this experience. The same amorality applies if you subscribe to a Darwinian/Materialist point of view about music.

Numerous articles on the web confirm the notion that many consider music to be another aspect of human evolution. Two Wikipedia articles, “Prehistoric Music” and “Evolutionary Musicology,” address the topic.¹ Two others are, “The evolution of music and human social capability,” “7 Theories On Why We Evolved to Love Music.” The basis of evolutionary claims for music are finds of primitive instruments such as the Divje Babe flute, “carved from a cave bear femur.” The claimed age for this instrument is at least 40,000 years. Supposedly, this pre-dates human speech, or at least written speech, demonstrating one aspect of “progress.”

The reason music evolved is a challenge for Darwinians. The problem is that there is no apparent adaptive function for music. In other words, it isn’t apparent what music contributes to the survival of the species. Darwin recognized this problem in his own work, devoting several pages to the notion that music enabled males to attract females, as the “7 Theories…” article cited above quotes him:

Primeval man probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude…that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes.

The theory is an attempt. It raises many questions, such as, “why are so many men so bad at singing?” Or, perhaps better, “are all those women hard of hearing?” In addition, it fails to explain musicality among women. Generally this theory doesn’t have many adherents today.

Other theories include “to keep in synch” with your tribe, so you can identify the sounds of predators in the forest and “to identify your tribe.” Or perhaps it was a means of “intimidating” predators, as some suggest. Or it may be simply the need to “feel emotions” or to “tickle the brain” – this one is sort of an admission that “music is useless from an evolutionary standpoint.” The last suggestion at “7 Theories…” is “survival of the funkiest” — the sounds that survive (the music) are those sounds humans weeded out of the many sounds they heard, a kind of cultural evolution brought about by human selection over time. (“Human selection” means humans doing the selecting — what we know of music is simply the survival of our “faves” through all the years of sound making.)

Well, all of this is very interesting (to some), but the wide disagreement among cognitive psychologists and other scientists suggests that no one knows the answer. It could be that they are asking the wrong questions!

The bottom line for this kind of thinking, however, is a denial of right and wrong. If music is a product of evolutionary processes, no one can say music has any moral component. There is no morals to music. It’s amoral.

Where have we heard that before?

Quite frankly, a Biblical worldview, with the great Creator God who made all things, who is good, who demands order in his universe, posits that the expressions of human creativity are subject to His norms, his values, his righteousness. If some speech can be immoral, why isn’t some music immoral? If some painting is immoral, why isn’t some music immoral? We could go on.

Christians who argue that music has no morality have more in common with Darwinian materialists than they do with a Biblical view of the world and creation.

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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

1. I am sure there are more than merely these two. [↩]