Though it seems pretty silly as humans can attract mates in a lot better ways than music.
Your arguments doesn't support your conclusion. Starting with the assumption that human males can attract mates in a lot better ways than music, doesn't mean that music doesn't help males (and even females) attract mates. It isn't just the "groupie" phenomenon. Its thinks like music, chanting, and/or dancing helping two people to get close or attracted to each other.
And it doesn't directly have to be mates attracting each other. Music might help groups form bonds that help them work together or avoid attacking each other. Music might cause emotions that help people relax, or gets them fired up for hunting or battle.
Even if they are bogus, there could be some survival benefit that we haven't thought of yet.
Sure. Anything we haven't thought of yet might exist. Or might not.
Which means arguments for ignorance are at best weak and generally considered logical fallacies. If we can't explain how something could happen naturally that isn't evidence that it didn't happen naturally.
Even if there isn't traits can evolve with no survival benefit.
Via what evolutionary mechanism? Not natural selection.
In addition to normal natural selection for fitness to the environment you have sexual selection, exchanges of genes or "gene flow", and genetic drift.
Mutations happen. Many of them are very negative and die out. Others are very positive and tend to get selected through "natural selection". Others can be slightly positive to slightly negative and not have any strong selection but can randomly survive anyway. Say you have a thousand noticeable traits that evolved randomly, without any of them being favored by natural selection, the odds of each specific one perpetuating itself through the species might not be great, but the odds that one or more of them do isn't that small, and can be increased if the species goes through a population bottleneck. If at any point only a small percentage of a species survives (which apparently happened with homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago do to an eruption of the Toba super-volcano, and may have happened with our species or its ancestors before that) its possible that the small group has a high predominance of a specific trait not common in the previous general population, and passes it along to the eventual larger general population.
"evidence for" - okaaay. "evidence for" would have to be pretty strong. I suppose if our brains were hard-wired to cause us to break out in hymnal music every 7 days, that might be "evidence for".
Though I see no evidence against ID in the - highly speculative natural causes that we don't know about yet but surely will someday - either.
Sure, the argument from ignorance is a fallacy both ways. If you argue it must be supernatural because we can't explain it, that's a faulty argument. If you argue it must be natural, because we haven't found a way to explain and understand the supernatural that's also an argument from ignorance.
OTOH. All that combination means in relation to music is that music doesn't prove or disprove the supernatural. Colson seemed to be stating that music does prove, or at least provide strong evidence for, the supernatural.
He also seems to endorse the argument from ignorance as valid.
"Then again, a non-bogus answer, such as “beats me,” won’t cut it, either. That’s because the biggest challenge to the materialist orthodoxy of the kind on display in the Boston Globe article is its inability to satisfactorily account for those things — like music, ethics, and altruism — that are most distinctly human."
If its the biggest challenge, that still doesn't mean that "beats me" doesn't cut it. He's saying you have to have an explanation or it is unreasonable not to accept the supernatural and he calls non-acceptance a “ridiculous slander”. |
