Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly
on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care …

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the
effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (eg, rhythmic entrainment) and …

There is certainly a need for a framework to guide the study of the physiological mechanisms
underlying the experience of music and the emotions that music evokes. However, this …

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes.
Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been …

Evidence suggests that humans might have neurological specializations for music
processing, but a compelling adaptationist account of music and dance is lacking. The …

Studies of the biology of music (as of language) are highly interdisciplinary and demand the
integration of diverse strands of evidence. In this paper, I present a comparative perspective …

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue
that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with …

Many of the most important properties of human groups–including properties that may give
one group an evolutionary advantage over another–are properly defined only at the level of …

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to
resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history:(1) the rise of large-scale …

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by
accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated …