Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2021
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.
Target article
Music as a coevolved system for social bonding
Related commentaries (24)
A boldly comparative approach will strengthen co-evolutionary accounts of musicality's origins
A neurodevelopmental disorders perspective into music, social attention, and social bonding
Beyond “consistent with” adaptation: Is there a robust test for music adaptation?
Clarifying the link between music and social bonding by measuring prosociality in context
Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music
Evolutionary linguistics can help refine (and test) hypotheses about how music might have evolved
Human evolution of gestural messaging and its critical role in the human development of music
If it quacks like a duck: The by-product account of music still stands
Is neural entrainment to rhythms the basis of social bonding through music?
Is the MSB hypothesis (music as a coevolved system for social bonding) testable in the Popperian sense?
Isochrony, vocal learning, and the acquisition of rhythm and melody
Music and dance are two parallel routes for creating social cohesion
Music as a social bond in patients with amnesia
Music as a trait in evolutionary theory: A musicological perspective
Not by signalling alone: Music's mosaicism undermines the search for a proper function
Oxytocin as an allostatic agent in the social bonding effects of music
Pre-hunt charade as the cradle of human musicality
Progress without exclusion in the search for an evolutionary basis of music
Rapid dissonant grunting, or, but why does music sound the way it does?
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Social bonding and music: Evidence from lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
The evolution of music as artistic cultural innovation expressing intuitive thought symbolically
Where they sing solo: Accounting for cross-cultural variation in collective music-making in theories of music evolution
Why don't cockatoos have war songs?
Author response
Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music
Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality