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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (2749)	10/13/2006 5:39:45 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10087

One can reason out why a taste for sweets and a dislike for bitter things would lead ancestral humans to eat good things and avoid bad ones. But rhythm, musical tones - there's no such reason underlying them. Some reasonable arguments for music actually causing a survival benefit have been asserted. Even if they are bogus, there could be some survival benefit that we haven't thought of yet. Even if there isn't traits can evolve with no survival benefit. Add that up and I can't see how the appreciation of music is evidence for intelligent design.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (2749)	10/13/2006 6:52:14 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Of course there are reasons that pulse and drums go together--Goodness, we spent nine months in a womb surrounded by our mother's heartbeat. Our very being responds to the rhythms of the earth, the moon, the sun. And while you may call it far-fetched, I am sorry, but those theories are no more farfetched than that God just "made it so". And at least these theories are being currently studied and tested, as have many before been. As for language and music, there are a great many studies done on their interaction and connectedness. Did you even look at the article on the correlations found in the study done at UT that I posted the other day? Many areas of the brain governing speech and music overlap, though some do not, and research is being done linking the two. THerapists are exploring the use of music in working with the linguistically brain damaged. And did you know stutterers can often sing without stuttering? The workings of our brains are phenomenally complex; we are a chemical soup that dishes up pleasure, depression, pain, love all depending on the firings of the neurons and the ingredients released. Why should music be any different in its ability to stimulate? As for animals and music: monkeys, our closest genetic match, use rhythm by pounding on logs, either for community and boundary setting or because they like it, and brain scans show that they are able to process music. (As of yet there is no way to tell what they THINK about it, of course, if they even do.) Brumar, you are dismissing everything I offer with no consideration at all and turning it into a really kind of odd refusal to consider music as a natural offshoot of language and biological development even with valid reasons for doing so. Our responses to music are being researched and studied, and many theories that are testable are out there, some of which already have support- as in the language and music neural connections. But you choose to just respond to these studies with a dismissive "I'm just not sure there's a link". The simplest explanation why we enjoy it is that it sets off sensory pleasure reactions, in the same way touch can our sensory triggers, or color stimulates our visual. We organize the visual into art, we organize the auditory into sound patterns. That seems so reasonable to me. But I guess it doesn't to you so I will end it here.