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Presumably music is an essential part of human evolution or it wouldn’t be there, but why? (continued)

Richard Widdess
Cambridge, UK

Music can’t be dismissed as an incidental byproduct of other factors: it has potentially had huge evolutionary significance. Music is of many kinds, fulfils many functions and involves various cognitive capacities, so its evolutionary significance is likely to be complex and varied.

To give one example, humans have a remarkable capacity that is rare in the animal kingdom: the ability to predict a regular beat and entrain our bodies to it. This allows us to engage collectively with other…