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Commentary advocates for social bonding as the key adaptive function of musicality, highlighting cultural evolution aspects.
Savage et al. make a compelling case, Mehr et al. less so, for social bonding and credible signalling, respectively, as the main adaptive function of human musicality. We express general advocacy for the former thesis, highlighting: 1) overlap between the two; 2) direct versus derived biological functions, and 3) aspects of music embedded in cultural evolution, e.g. departures from tonality.
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Popescu et al. (2020) studied this question.
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