The Thing with Feathers (17 page)

All cultures have embraced music in some form. Because it is so universal, music must fulfill some part of being human. Musical ability is hardwired in a fundamental way; children begin to sing and dance without much guidance, and recent research has indicated that even sleeping newborns, two or three days old, can sense the beat in a series of drum rhythms.

But as Steven Pinker argued in his 1997 bestseller
How the Mind Works
, even though music helps define who we are, it doesn’t necessarily help us survive. Pinker agreed with Darwin’s assertion that music does not serve any practical use to humans; without it, we’d still be able to secure food, shelter, mates, and other basics of life. Other animals don’t write operas or download tracks from iTunes, and they do just fine. Maybe it’s for the best that vultures don’t lose themselves in melodic contemplation.

Pinker suggested that the evolution of music in particular, and the arts in general, was simply a by-product of language
and other complex brain functions, asserting that music is “auditory cheesecake”—designed to tickle the “pleasure circuits of the brain” like so many unnecessary fats and oils. While interesting to us, said Pinker, music is inherently superfluous.

As you might imagine, the whole auditory-cheesecake premise didn’t go over well with artists, musicians, and historians, who believe that music deeply enriches our lives. And many evolutionary biologists also disagreed, suggesting that music could have evolved as an adaptive benefit of natural selection instead of as a by-product. This opposing camp offered a number of possible alternatives for the origins of music.

One popular theory states that our musical roots can be traced back to “motherese,” the whispered communication between a mother and her baby that strengthens the familial bond. Modern parents coo to their children just as they probably did thousands of years ago; the way we change our voices in the presence of babies seems instinctual. Perhaps that instinct led us gradually to adapt our sounds to other situations.

Another idea is that music originated in seduction. Many animals, especially birds, sing beautiful melodies to prospective mates (even if they don’t keep a beat). Our own songs could be an elaborate ritual of attraction that, like a peacock’s tail feathers, was heavily selected for across many generations. Darwin concluded that this was probably the case, although he seemed unsure of himself; for inspiration, he looked at male gibbons, which sing to hold territories and attract females.

Darwin also mentioned another theory, not incompatible with any previously mentioned, that music predates language. He suggested that our imitation of earthly sounds as a simple means of communication coalesced into words, grammar, and modern syntax. (Noam Chomsky, the prominent American linguist and activist, suggests that grammar is universal across
all languages, an indication that we all follow the same rules, however different we may sound.)

Other researchers have lately picked up this thread again. Psychologist Steven Brown has proposed the musilanguage hypothesis, which holds that at one point in our evolutionary history, language and music were one and the same. As Ani Patel found with brain imaging, we compute the two in similar ways, and language and music have so much in common that, in a sense, they are still indistinguishable. Both contain elements of pitch, tone, phrasing, melody, and rhythm. Either one can be used to communicate facts or convey emotion. In some languages, such as Chinese, changes in tone alone can differentiate words with separate meanings.

It’s easy to see how we might have ended up with musical languages. Early humans, trying to convey meaning to their friends, began to imitate sounds from the world around them: wind, water, other animals. That imitation led to the formation of words, which gradually became more complex and abstract. Children learned to mimic the sounds that their parents made, and systems of communication passed down through generations.

What about rhythm? Does it relate to the basic human walking gait, as some suggest, or could it have evolved as a way to synchronize social groups—even as a method of putting armies into a battle trance? It seems likely that our ability to maintain a beat developed along with early music, but because sound leaves no fossils or other long-term traces, we may never know which came first, the melody or the beat.

Snowball’s ability to synchronize to music shows a hidden talent in parrots that mirrors our own. If, as Ani Patel and Adena Schachner believe, rhythm arises from vocal mimicry, it could be evidence for the musilanguage theory. And in that
case, the entire musical field would derive from imitation—a fine irony in today’s copyright-obsessed music industry.

But results of Patel and Schachner’s research also could go the other way, directly supporting Steven Pinker’s assertion that music is just a quirky by-product of evolution. Schachner seems to think so, anyway. “If an observed behavior does not exist in the natural behavioral repertoire,” she has written, “it has no potential to increase or decrease fitness and thus cannot be directly selected for or against.” In other words, behaviors that don’t exist in the wild, such as dancing to a beat, have no effect on an animal’s ultimate survival, so they can’t have evolved as an adaptive benefit. Parrots, at least, have no use for music except in the company of humans; their ability to sync to it shows that they must have evolved their ability as a by-product.

This line of reasoning could naturally be extended to us. If vocal mimicry incidentally caused parrots to be able to jam to the Backstreet Boys, why not people? The same mechanism could apply to both.

The idea is not as dispiriting as it sounds. Regardless of how we came to appreciate music, our enjoyment of it is no less meaningful. Many aspects of our modern culture aren’t immediately linked to the rough-and-ready world of natural selection, and that’s a good thing: It’s what makes us human. Whether music is auditory cheesecake or a prehistoric battle cry doesn’t change its powerful influence.

Just ask Snowball. His whole existence has been validated, at least in human terms, by the love of music. But please, for the sake of all that’s feathery, someone teach that bird some musical taste.

seeing red

WHEN THE PECKING ORDER BREAKS DOWN

L
et’s talk chicken.

By the end of the twentieth century, domestic chickens outnumbered humans by about four to one on this planet, distinguishing them as the most abundant bird species on earth. Actually, chickens are the world’s most numerous reptile, amphibian, mammal, or bird, period. At any given time, the globe hosts about 20 billion domestic chickens, though most don’t live very long. The average North American eats more than fifty pounds of chicken a year (the equivalent of about twenty-seven individual birds), which ranks, pound for pound, slightly less than beef and a bit more than pork.

Birdwatchers tend to denigrate chickens because domesticated species don’t qualify on official life lists. Unless you happen to prowl the tiger-infested jungles of India, where a few wild red junglefowl—the tropical ancestor of today’s McChicken—still flock together, you won’t get much credit for observing poultry. But we should pay attention to chickens, if for no other reason than their familiarity.

We can learn a lot about the world from farm fowl, as a six-year-old Norwegian boy demonstrated a hundred years ago.

—

THAT YOUNG BOY,
tending his mother’s chicken coop outside of Oslo, noticed something curious about the birds he fed every morning. When any two hungry chickens met at the food tray, one would always make way for the other, patiently waiting its turn. Instead of fighting like unruly teenagers over Thanksgiving dinner, the chickens usually formed an orderly line with minimal fuss.

Furthermore, the order was utterly predictable. One particular hen was always the first to eat, followed by a second individual, then a third, and so on. At the water dish, their behavior was the same. If one tried to jump the line, it was barraged by pecks from the birds in front, and it quickly retreated.

By the time he was ten, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe was keeping his observations in detailed notebooks. He’d discovered that the order of the feed line was based on aggression; certain hens, for some reason, always dominated others. So Schjelderup-Ebbe—let’s call him Thor—began charting aggressive interactions among the birds in his mother’s chicken coop, hoping to figure out, scientifically, whether his ideas made sense.

When Thor tallied up his observations, a pattern emerged. The top bird, at various times, had pecked every single one of the other chickens in the coop, but had never been pecked in return. In second place was another hen that had pecked everyone else except the top chicken, and, accordingly, had been pecked only by that bird. This trend continued down the line until only one poor hen was left standing—barely—which had been pecked by every other chicken in the coop but never delivered a single peck of its own. The alpha chicken always ate first, and the lowliest one always got the crumbs.

It took Thor many years to accumulate these observations because his flock seemed so comfortable with their order that they rarely acted aggressively toward one another. Each bird knew its place. The lower-ranked hens accepted their status and preferred not to challenge up; altogether, it was a fairly peaceful if unequal arrangement.

The system wasn’t always perfectly linear, though. In a few cases, A pecked B, B pecked C, but C pecked A. Thor called these situations “triangles,” and, like the romantic plot of some Hollywood films, triangles were intriguing. Rather than trying
to offer theories or explanations—others would do that, later—he continued to keep detailed notes about chicken behavior, eventually using the data for his dissertation in 1922. Thor termed his system of hierarchies
Hackordnung
, a German word that translates to “pecking order” in English. It was the first time anyone had used the term, which would come to be routinely applied to humans in everyday language by the 1950s.

This concept of social hierarchy wasn’t really news for poultry growers. Chickens have been domesticated for roughly 4,000 years, and any old keeper could tell you that some birds dominate others in their coop. Over the years, farmers have learned a few basic truths about pecking orders in chickens. Dominance is related to size, but the correlation is not very strong; experienced and wily birds are much more likely to rise through the ranks than mere big brutes. And one sure way to incite fights is to introduce a new hen to an existing flock. Do it on a Friday, wise farmers say, so you can keep an eye on things for a couple days. Sneak new birds into the henhouse after dark when chickens are sleepy and new birds can’t accidentally steal someone’s favorite roosting spot. Don’t introduce one new bird into an existing flock, but bring in at least two at a time so they can partner up and form an alliance.

But Thor was the first to put science behind the concept of social inequality in chickens. Today, his notebooks are referenced as a pivotal point by practically every academician who studies dominance hierarchies; some say he pioneered an entirely new field of behavioral research.

As with many geniuses of their time, Thor was not applauded for his efforts, which then seemed dangerously anthropomorphic. After a rival spread rumors that Thor had written an anonymous story criticizing his professor—who happened to be the first female professor in Norway—in the student paper,
Thor’s reputation was irreparably damaged, and he never received his doctorate degree.

The man who coined the term “pecking order” was, ironically, pecked into submissive oblivion.

—

WE’LL COME BACK TO CHICKENS.
But first we have to talk about tennis for a moment.

Every year in November, the world’s top eight male tennis players convene for a high-stakes tournament called the World Tour Finals, an end-of-the-year championship that traditionally caps each season’s grueling ten-month playing schedule. Since 1970, the event has rotated between fifteen different cities and it’s been played on carpet, grass, and hard courts—both indoors and outdoors. It’s been won by the greatest players of all time (Roger Federer, Pete Sampras) and one or two guys you’ve probably never heard of (Manuel Orantes, Michael Stich). Through it all, an unusual format has endured at the tournament.

Most tennis tournaments are played with classic single-elimination draws in which if you lose one match, you’re out. Half of the players advance in each round until only one is left standing. Single elimination is straightforward, brutal, and occasionally unpredictable; if someone has one bad day, that’s it. The format is also efficient at picking winners. In a field of 128 players, one needs to survive only seven matches to win the tournament.

But the World Tour Finals, with just eight players in the draw, is a different sort of event. Rarely do the top tennis stars get the opportunity to play just each other, and everybody relishes these high-profile matchups. Tournament organizers settled
on a partial round-robin format instead of the usual single-elimination strategy. The field is divided into two groups of four. Within those groups, everyone plays everyone else, then the top two from each group advance to the semifinals, which sets up a traditional final.