[karlb]

Even if music can be “auditory cheesecake,” I don't believe that that's an adequate explanation for it.

The book “Why Do People Sing: Music in Human Evolution” proposes a theory that's both outrageous but also has (I believe) a ring of truth to it.

The following article summarizes the theory: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/

[lukas099]

I have my own idea of why music is so important to our species.

It started out as a programming bug ("auditory cheesecake"): certain arrangements of sound hijack the brain's ability to recognize patterns and emotions in pitch of voice, creating an emotional response in the listener. The best musicians are those who are best at manipulating their listeners' emotions in this way. It's not hard to see how this made them more successful reproducers early on.

At this point people could have evolved to be better at resisting this sort of manipulation; however, this proved to be too high an evolutionary hurdle to overcome. Instead, the people who were most susceptible to this manipulation actually gained an advantage -- Since they were most likely to mate with musicians, their offspring were most likely to become the best musicians in the next generation!

Thus, a positive feedback loop was created where successive generations became more musically-talented and more susceptible to the effects of music.

If you find this hypothesis interesting, I highly suggest Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I think he calls this general phenomenon the "sexy male" hypothesis.

[astazangasta]

The world is littered with evolutionary just-so stories, that like a good horoscope bring all the right details together and sound just right, but are total hooey with no evidence. The fact is we know little about how we evolved and determinations like this are nearly impossible, no matter how fun they sound. See also the Aquatic Ape theory, etc.

[dceddia]

This seems to be a trend lately (or maybe one I was unaware of before) - finding some sort of evolutionary reasoning to justify this or that. It's very pronounced in self-help literature, books about psychology, etc. But it seems to be spreading to all sorts of fields.

Clearly they're pretty hard to verify in a lot of cases, and I'm starting to wonder how many of these evolutionary "we are this way because our ancestors did X and were hunted by Y" theories are mostly fluff.

[stuxnet79]

This is exactly it. A lot of these speculations are not scientifically tractable.

[raldi]

I'll summarize the summary: The theory is that a group of tribesmen moving in unison and chanting together to magnify the volume of their combined voice confuses and intimidates other animals, and also gives the appearance they the group is one giant organism.