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Sex and drugs and rock and roll

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Steven Pinker*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. pinker@wjh.harvard.edu

Abstract

This article is extraordinarily rigorous and rich, although there are reasons to be skeptical of its theory that music originated to signal group quality and infant solicitude. These include the lack of any signature of the centrality of these functions in the distribution or experience of music; of a role for the pleasure taken in music; and of its connections with language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., … Glowacki, L. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468), 957970.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1997). How the minds works. Norton.Google Scholar