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Darwin’s Theory of Music, Rhetoric and Poetry

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Stephen J. Gould: The Scientific Legacy

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Abstract

This essay on Darwin’s evolutionary theory of human music, rhetoric and poetry will first portray the way Darwin conceives of human music in relation to his animal model of artful singing. Second, it discusses the evolutionary heritage from previously evolved musical capacities Darwin diagnosed in verbal language, more specifically in its artful elaboration in rhetoric and poetry. Darwin’s speculations are boiled down to two testable hypotheses: (1) Rhetorically enhanced messages should be aesthetically more appealing, recruit more attention, and result in stronger affective involvement than the same messages deprived of the rhetorical extra-charms. (2) Affective responses to rhetorically enhanced versus rhetorically flat messages should moreover facilitate associations of an at least latent sexual dimension, and/or lead to different responses to sexual primes. In the third section of the present article, empirical studies are partly reported and partly envisaged that have a potential to test these hypotheses. Throughout this essay Darwin’s hypotheses are projected onto Stephen Jay Gould’s typology of evolutionary processes as well as onto older traditions in rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Therefore, the criticism voiced, for instance, by Stephen Mithen that Darwin's theory of language cannot be correct because it cannot explain the cognitive and symbolic features of human verbal language as a "derivative of music" (Mithen 2007, p. 26) is completely missing the mark.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Winfried Menninghaus

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  1. Winfried Menninghaus
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Correspondence to Winfried Menninghaus .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ist. Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, Campo Santo Stefano 2945, Venezia, 30124, Venezia, Italy

    Gian Antonio Danieli

  2. Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, University of Padua and Istituto Veneto, Padua 2945, Venice, 30124, Venezia, Italy

    Alessandro Minelli

  3. , Department of Biology, University of Padua, Italy, Via U. Bassi 58/B, Padova, 35131, Padova, Italy

    Telmo Pievani

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Menninghaus, W. (2013). Darwin’s Theory of Music, Rhetoric and Poetry. In: Danieli, G., Minelli, A., Pievani, T. (eds) Stephen J. Gould: The Scientific Legacy. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-5424-0_11

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