kdolo: I agree with almost everything you said in your latest post, and I appreciate your having phrased it so cogently. That primal scenario is something I think about a lot: it's definitely not something I've forgotten. The one thing I'd point out, though, specifically in reference to the case of famous musicians, is that music should play a somewhat different role in modern life than it did in primitive life, and it would be good for society to recognize that.
Music has two basic functions. The first function is to create pleasure by artificially stimulating the part of our hearing system that's evolved, for survival reasons, to identify certain sounds as being good, healthy, and reassuring, as opposed to other sounds that are identified as being bad, unhealthy, and dangerous. Music is an artificial construction that maximizes the good sounds and usually minimizes the bad sounds (mostly using them as a sort of flavoring), somewhat like cuisine, which maximizes good, desired food elements and usually minimizes bad, undesired ones, again using the latter for flavoring. (Many spices are actually poisons of one kind or another.)
The second function of music is to be a courtship display of neurological fitness and general healthiness: intelligence, fine perception, muscular coordination, skilled vocal production, and so forth. That's what women are responding to when they go crazy over some famous musician. But in the modern world, there are better ways of demonstrating those qualities than getting up on stage and singing or playing an instrument. A man can show his intelligence far more accurately by getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering or biochemistry than by being a musician. General health can be demonstrated better by medical checkups and testing than by demonstrating how nice your singing voice sounds and how well you move in a musical performance. And muscular coordination, while nice, and still useful for lots of things, isn't quite as important as it used to be when it could be a matter of life or death in hunting or fighting for large numbers of men. (And I'm not trying to make excuses for myself by saying that: I'm a reasonably coordinated guy, and in fact a Chinese woman gave me her cell number in Beijing last year partly because she was turned on by my typing speed on my laptop.) I wish more women would appreciate those facts, and be more willing to judge men by substantive modern criteria than by the primitive criteria of music.
I'm happy to judge women by modern criteria myself, by the way. Lately I've been dating a cute young Asian math professor, and that gets my gonads jumping a lot more than watching Lady Gaga. (Although between my math professor and pianist Yuja Wang, it'd be closer to a draw.)
Music has two basic functions. The first function is to create pleasure by artificially stimulating the part of our hearing system that's evolved, for survival reasons, to identify certain sounds as being good, healthy, and reassuring, as opposed to other sounds that are identified as being bad, unhealthy, and dangerous. Music is an artificial construction that maximizes the good sounds and usually minimizes the bad sounds (mostly using them as a sort of flavoring), somewhat like cuisine, which maximizes good, desired food elements and usually minimizes bad, undesired ones, again using the latter for flavoring. (Many spices are actually poisons of one kind or another.)
The second function of music is to be a courtship display of neurological fitness and general healthiness: intelligence, fine perception, muscular coordination, skilled vocal production, and so forth. That's what women are responding to when they go crazy over some famous musician. But in the modern world, there are better ways of demonstrating those qualities than getting up on stage and singing or playing an instrument. A man can show his intelligence far more accurately by getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering or biochemistry than by being a musician. General health can be demonstrated better by medical checkups and testing than by demonstrating how nice your singing voice sounds and how well you move in a musical performance. And muscular coordination, while nice, and still useful for lots of things, isn't quite as important as it used to be when it could be a matter of life or death in hunting or fighting for large numbers of men. (And I'm not trying to make excuses for myself by saying that: I'm a reasonably coordinated guy, and in fact a Chinese woman gave me her cell number in Beijing last year partly because she was turned on by my typing speed on my laptop.) I wish more women would appreciate those facts, and be more willing to judge men by substantive modern criteria than by the primitive criteria of music.
I'm happy to judge women by modern criteria myself, by the way. Lately I've been dating a cute young Asian math professor, and that gets my gonads jumping a lot more than watching Lady Gaga. (Although between my math professor and pianist Yuja Wang, it'd be closer to a draw.)