Innateness, Learning, and the Difficulty of Determining Whether Music is an Evolutionary AdaptationA Commentary on Justus & Hutsler (2005) and McDermott & Hauser (2005)

McDermott and Hauser (2005) and Justus and Hutsler (2005) argue that in order for music to be an evolutionary adaptation, and not an exaptation, music must be constrained by innate factors that are specific to music and that evolved because music conferred survival advantages. I argue that the dichotomy between adaptation and exaptation is not very clear for higher cognitive functions such as music and language, because genes set up general …