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Darwinizing the Philosophy of Music Education Darwinizing the Philosophy of Music Education Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Music Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences University of KwaZulu-Natal by Jeffrey E. Robinson Supervisor: Prof. Emily Akuno January 2011 ii If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I‘d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. Daniel Dennett - Darwin‟s Dangerous Idea Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality. Gregory Bateson - Mind and nature: a necessary unity iii Table of contents Acknowledgements (viii) Summary – Keywords -Note to reader (ix) Chapter One: Introduction: purpose of and rationale for this study Introduction (1) On Philosophy and related matters (7) On the Philosophy of Music Education (8) A need for utopian vision? (9) On Darwinism, Darwinian Science and Darwinizing educational philosophy (18) The natural selection algorithm (19) Substrate neutrality (20) Mindlessness (21) Foolproofness (22) Darwinism and nihilism (23) It‘s all about feeling!(23) Bringing education back into the discussion (24) Biological vs. cultural evolution (24) The role of environment in natural selection (25) Environmental instability (26) Who cares? (27) We care! (27) Pressing Paleolithic buttons (28) Darwinism and Humanistic Psychology (29) Virtual environments (29) Then and now (30) Modern and postmodern discontent (31) Nurture vs. nature; blank slate vs. genetic automaton (31) A paradox (35) Materialism and the mind-body fallacy (35) The synaptic self (37) Nurturing nature (38) Culture as pleasure technology (38) Something more than pleasure technology? (39) Existential transformation? (40) Education for social and ecological transformation (41) Our reliance on experts (42) The burgeoning infosphere (42) Memetic evolution and ideology (43) Ideology and our evolved psychology (44) Concluding remarks (45) iv Chapter Two: The Adapted Mind: What an adaptationist understanding of mind can tell us about music, art, education, and culture The nature-nurture dichotomy - a non sequitur (46) Cognitivism and the logical necessity of in-built cognitive mechanisms (46) On mentalese and innate conceptual structure (47) On the neurological basis of innate concepts and mechanisms (48) Epigenesis by synapse selection, a crucial matter for education (49) On the ‗computational theory of mind‘ (49) On perception and its illusory nature (50) On aural perception (51) On the feelingfulness of perception and our predispositions toward musical stimuli (52) Returning to the question of music‘s adaptive status (53) Criteria for what qualifies as an adaptation (53) On adaptations, by-products, and preadaptations (53) Does music qualify? (54) Clearing up an apparent confusion: music as artifact vs. music as behavior (56) Musicking engages neural systems with clear adaptive functions (57) Music and language (57) Auditory scene analysis (58) Music, proprioception and kinesthesia (59) Music and sentience (59) Emotional calls (59) Music and sexual selection (60) Sexual selection vis-à-vis natural selection (61) Bateman‘s principle (61) Add status and competitiveness to the mix (62) Music and machismo (62) Art and status (63) Status vis-à-vis Maslow‘s needs (64) On music and gender (64) On sexual dimorphism (65) Sexual division of labor (66) Quantitative differences between the sexes (67) On sexism and feminism (68) Gender differences in music and music education domains (69) On social constructivism and music (71) On ‗runaway selection‘ (73) Artificial selection vis-à-vis natural selection (74) Human ‗created‘ environments of selection (75) Taking stock regarding gender differences (76) Cognitive fluidity, domain generality, cross-modality (77) Rethinking music as communication (78) Once again, it is all about feeling (78) ‗Music and emotion‘ as an active interest in the Philosophy of Music Education (79) Emotional manipulation and internal organization (79) Communication, verbal and nonverbal (80) How much is universal? (81) Coming back to emotional manipulation and communication (82) v Beyond sexual selection: music and socialization (83) Music as social mediator (84) Monkey business (84) Infant-directed speech (85) Laying the foundations for social competence (87) The education of feeling? (87) Art and internal regulation (88) More on intimacy, infant-directed speech and ontogeny (89) On the Mozart Effect (90) Active musicking and cognitive development (91) It‘s all about living in groups (92) Bringing music into the mix (94) Why is music so often made in groups? (95) On group selection theory (95) On the ‗Baldwin Effect‘ (97) Covert processes of socialization (99) Adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation (100) Bringing music back into the discussion (101) On ‗somatic markers‘ (102) ―Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder‖ (102) Maladaptive worlds (103) Education as brain organization: to what ends? (104) On human universals (105) ‗Making meaningful‘: our universal proclivity for elaboration (106) The seven plots of fiction (107) Landscape preferences (108) Musical preferences (109) High vs. low art (110) Conspicuous consumption and status (110) Radical chic (113) Looking both ways? (115) Trust the hippies! (115) Adaptationism vis-à-vis socialist realism (116) The Derriere Guard (117) On accessibility (120) What is universal in art? (121) 1. Direct pleasure (121) 2. Skill and virtuosity (123) 3. Style (123) 4. Novelty and creativity (124) 5. Criticism (126) 6. Representation (128) 7. Special focus (130) 8. Expressive individuality (131) 9. Emotional saturation (133) 10. Intellectual challenge (134) 11. Art traditions and institutions (134) 12. Imaginative experience (134) vi Chapter Three: Darwinizing Culture: The case for Gene-Culture Coevolution Theory Introduction (138) Darwin‘s dangerous idea revisited (140) Music and art as fruits of genetic evolution (140) PART 1: Culture as an Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) for genetic evolution (141) Hereditary lineages and genetic differences (141) Lineage and race (142) Size is important! (142) ‗The psychic unity of mankind‘ (143) Time frames (144) What is a race? (145) The utility of the concept (146) Racist science? (147) On Multiple Intelligences (149) Support for the ‗g‘ factor (149) What to make of this? (150) Ontogeny makes the nature-nurture dichotomy a non sequitur (151) Child development and Evolutionary Psychology (152) PART 2: The case for Memetics (154) Memetics (154) On imitation (155) Sociobiology vs. Gene-Culture Coevolution Theory and Memetics (156) The selfish gene vs. the selfish meme, similarities and differences (157) Hard-line Memeticists: Dennett and Blackmore (158) ‗The Grand Illusion of Consciousness‘ (159) A massively parallel computational system (161) Chasing the elusive meme: a musical example (163) Phemotypic mutability (165) Memes and the ‗culture‘ of songbirds (166) Words as memes (166) What is information? (167) So what is an idea? (169) On mentalese (170) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (171) No word for ‗music‘(172) Nothing but algorithms (173) Sperber‘s critique of memetics (174) Are prions replicators? (175) Meme mutation (176) Closing the case for Memetics (177) How far can Memetics take us? (177) Bringing Memetics into the Philosophy of Music Education (177) Reductionism: a survival meme? (179) Wrapping things up (180) vii Chapter Four: Darwinizing the Philosophy of Music Education It is all about ideas (181) Educating for praxis (183) Regelski on ‗education for praxis‘ (185) Enter the Mayday Group (187) Woodford on education for ‗social intelligence‘ (187) Educatorship (188) What about Darwinian perspective? (191) Critical consciousness revisited (192) Darwinizing the Philosophy of Music Education (193) Interdisciplinary and integrated arts approaches to music education (195) On procedural knowledge (196) The experience of ‗flow‘ (197) Darwinian perspective in Music Matters (200) Eurhythmics? (201) Returning to the issue of domain-specificity (203) And what of song? (204) Hip Hop: a way forward for integrated arts education? (206) Emceeing (MCing) (208) Prosody: the musicality of language (208) Has music become too much a ‗pitch game‘? (209) Two left feet! (210) More on the development of communicative capacity through music education (211) Thinking outside the box (213) Music education as aesthetic education: developing responsiveness to ‗the pattern which connects‘ (214) Looking to the East (215) Buddhist praxis? (218) ‗The pattern which connects‘ (222) Universalism vs. contextualism in the Philosophy of Music Education (223) Swanwick on ‗music as culture‘ (225) Education for praxis through the musical arts (228) References (232) viii Acknowledgments I would firstly like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor and ‗rafiki‘, Prof. Emily Akuno, who has been such a supportive and gracious sounding board along the way and who has a great editorial eye. Secondly I would like to thank my colleagues in the UKZN School of Music who supported me not only with needed words of encouragement and advice, but in excusing and accommodating my inattention to duties and my frequent unavailability in recent months. This project turned out to be an undertaking beyond anything that I imagined three years
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