Musicality and gene-culture coevolution: ten concepts to guide productive exploration

A growing number of researchers across the sciences and humanities theorize that human musicality arose via an interplay of cultural invention and biological evolution, or “gene-culture coevolution.” This chapter offers ten concepts to help guide productive cross-disciplinary discussions on this topic. Such interactions across traditional disciplinary boundaries are needed to propel deep explorations of human musicality. These explorations are important for the study of human origins because musicality may prove to be a model system for exploring cognitive gene-culture coevolution, a process increasingly thought to be central to the evolution of the human mind.

The Treachery of Images: Why Images Do not Exist and There Are Only Flat Objects

Do images exist? In this paper I argue that the notion of an image is ontologically empty – i.e., images are no more than a cultural invention akin to epicycles in astronomy. There are only flat objects engaged in various causal roles. In this paper I will defend the thesis that in visual culture, in the neurosciences, and in philosophy of mind, there is no convincing evidence in favor of their existence. Moreover, I will outline a series of arguments aiming at showing that images do not exist. I will discuss briefly discuss why many authors – from the iconic turn to the neurosciences – use the notion of image as though it were something real. I will conclude suggesting to drop the subject-object divide and to consider a completely flat ontology made only of (relative) objects.

Cultures of Invention

This chapter revisits the most important general question underlying this study. It considers what made fundamental change possible in a pre-modern society, before the old world ended. The answer given so far has been multifaceted, involving water, people, events, ideas, and commodities: an early modern society in motion, and that motion discernible, in retrospect, as what might be called a process of cultural invention. The chapter thus considers what sustained that process over centuries, territories, and oceans. It shows how England modernized along Dutch lines. However, the Anglo-Dutch relationship was not merely one of imitation, but was creative and ultimately transformative.

Introduction

This chapter critiques teleological accounts of Britain’s Sixties, arguing that the episode witnessed, not the arrival of ‘late modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’, but the sudden and contingent invention of an alternative modernity, triggered by profound anxieties about the Cold War. This alternative modernity was invented, largely unselfconsciously, by various cultural elites between 1955 and 1965, and was then enacted on a widespread scale from the late 1960s. Radical Anglican clergymen were ideally placed to play a pivotal role in the initial stages of this wider process of cultural invention, being simultaneously moral radicals and moral insiders, in a moral culture which during the 1950s had firmly identified itself as Christian. Radicals’ readings of Christian eschatology allowed them to play a crucial role in disseminating the idea that Britain’s future was necessarily ‘secular’, and significant contributory roles in the wider construction of British secularity as intrinsically global, anti-authoritarian, antinomian, and egalitarian.

Speaking My Mind: Just Another Hand-Me-Down? From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, by Michael C. Corballis. 2002. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 272 pp., $27.95.

In From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language Michael Corballis provides an engaging, highly readable and provocative account of the evolution of human language. The primary thesis of his book is that language evolved from manual and facial gestures rather than from animal vocalizations, as is often assumed. While this point of view has been expressed by others during the last few centuries (for example, Condillac in 1747), it has never been argued more forcefully and with as much supporting scholarly evidence. (I suspect that it has also never been argued with greater use of hand/mouth adages, clichés and puns.) Among the more provocative ideas is the suggestion that human speech, like writing, was a cultural invention subsequent to gestural language rather than the evolutionary essence of language.