The natural history of musical rhythm: functional and mechanistic theories on the evolution of human rhythm cognition and the relevance of rhythmic animal behaviors

There has recently been a growing interest to investigate rhythm cognition in nonhuman animals as a way of tracking the evolutionary origins of human musicality - i.e., the ability to perceive, enjoy and produce music. During the last two decades, there has been an explosion of theoretical proposals aimed at explaining why and how humans have evolved into musical beings, and the empirical comparative research has also gained momentum. In this paper, we focus on the rhythmic component of musicality, and review functional and mechanistic theoretical proposals on abilities regarded as prerequisites for perceiving and producing rhythmic structures similar to those encountered in music. For each theoretical proposal we also review supporting and contradictory empirical findings. To acknowledge that the evolutionary study of musicality requires an interdisciplinary approach, our review strives to cover perspectives and findings from as many disciplines as possible. We conclude with a research agenda that highlights relevant, yet thus far neglected topics in the comparative and evolutionary study of rhythm cognition. Specifically, we call for a widened research focus that will include additional rhythmic abilities besides entrainment, additional channels of perception and production besides the auditory and vocal ones, and a systematic focus on the functional contexts in which rhythmic signals spontaneously occur. With this expanded focus, and drawing from systematic observation and experimentation anchored in multiple disciplines, animal research is bound to generate many important insights into the adaptive pressures that forged the component abilities of human rhythm cognition and their (socio-)cognitive and (neuro-)biological underpinnings.

Appealing to the minds of gods: A novel cultural evolutionary account of religious appeals and an empirical assessment using ethnographic data from eight diverse societies

While appeals to gods and spirits are ubiquitous throughout human societies past and present, deities’ postulated concerns vary across populations. How does the content of beliefs about and appeals to gods vary across groups, and what accounts for this variation? With particular emphasis on locally important deities, we develop a novel cultural evolutionary account that includes a set of predictive criteria for what deities will be associated with in various socioecological contexts. We then apply these criteria in an analysis of individual-level ethnographic free-list data on what pleases and angers locally relevant deities from eight diverse societies. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to cross-cultural variation in god beliefs and appeals fare against our findings and close by considering some key implications of our methods and findings for the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion.

Five Years of India Rankings 2016 2020 an Evolutionary Study

India Rankings i.e. National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF) started in 2015 and completed its fifth year of yearly exercise in 2020. This article is based on evolutionary study of India Rankings. The study highlights the life cycle of India Rankings including different disciplines and their framework. It also focuses on how the framework is being matured year by year on the basis of availability of data in Institutions. There were several changes / deviations that happened due to non-availability of data or garbage data entered by the Institutes.