Music and Evolution

Dennis Prager considers music a gift from God.

More to the point, he considers the ability to enjoy music such a gift. There's no particular reason why we should have such an ability. From the show archives:

Scientists offer explanations, most of them startling in their silliness, but their current conclusion is that they don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any evolutionary value to pleasing melodies. We just like them so much. Could music be a gift from God? That, of course, is the one explanation science won’t accept.

The problem is, saying God did it is not an explanation. Imagine a parallel universe where people are left completely cold by music, but respond to visual cues, such as a Jackson Pollock painting. Such a gift could be called a gift from God, but calling it that would not explain why that particular gift was given and not the gift of music.

Subject: Music and evolution

To: "Dennis Prager"

Dennis:

How would "evolutionists" (I prefer the term "scientists") explain a love of music?

First of all, I don't believe a love of music necessarily developed as an end in itself.  That is, I don't think there was any particular reason to evolve a love of music.  I suspect it's a side-effect of something else.

One possibility:  a lot of our success comes from our ability to recognize patterns in the world around us.  It may well be that the same faculties that make patterns stand out in our brains make some patterns so compelling that they provoke deep responses in the brain.

If we assume the faculty for enjoying music is a supernatural gift, then we have the question, why music?  Why not something visual?  Why *don't* people respond as deeply to a painting?  Why can a symphony move people, even though nothing in nature makes the combination of sounds we hear in such a work, when a Jackson Pollock painting is merely interesting.

One of the features of science is that it doesn't have explanations for everything yet.  Indeed, there are many things science may never be able to explain.  Maybe music can't be accounted for in the material realm science is equipped to deal with.  Maybe the explanation of music as a side-effect of something else will never satisfy. 

It may well be that attempts to find an evolutionary survival role for music are as silly as attempts to explain all disasters, all cases of disease, all accidents, all good or bad fortune, as God's way of rewarding the good and punishing the bad.  Any realm of inquiry can be pushed to ridiculous extremes. Scientists attempt explanations of any number of things using their preferred theories, and at the extreme, this is rightly called hubris. Religious folks will often declare their knowledge of God's will in bestowing cancer on a child, or AIDS on an individual or group, or capsizing a ferry boat and killing the people on board.  It seems to me there's plenty of hubris to go around.

Ultimately, science makes one grand assumption: Everything can be explained without the need to violate natural laws. A field of study that allows for entities that can set aside the laws of the unierse to explain something is no longer explaining anything, because it explains nothing. Once you have God doing things by some unspecified mechanism, you can use God to explain literally anything.