Definition
As per Pinker’s hypothesis, music is not evolutionary adaptive, but rather is a by-product of other evolutionarily evolved traits, and one that serves no biological function. Pinker suggests that music is an “auditory cheesecake.” Cheesecake fulfills our evolved desire for fat and sugar, but the desire for cheesecake did not evolve and is merely a by-product, pleasurable but biologically useless. Similarly, Pinker regards music as a highly pleasurable by-product of the evolution of other mental faculties, primarily language.
Introduction
In How the Mind Works (Pinker, 1997), Steven Pinker offers an account of how the major faculties of mind were designed by natural selection. However, not all mental faculties have evolved through natural selection. Music, for Pinker, represents a clear example of a nonadaptive “pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate...
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References
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Shintel, H. (2019). Music as Auditory Cheesecake. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2851-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2851-1
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