Why music?

My latest intellectual hero Geoff Miller makes a good case that music and the arts have evolved as part of the interplay between mate choice and competition. I wonder why everybody isn't as consumed with the biological underpinnings of their passions as I am. Lucky for them.

Here's an example of Miller's thoughts on music in evolution to whet your appetite:

"Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. Dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength, and health. Because nervousness interferes with fine motor control, including voice control, singing in key may reveal self-confidence, status, and extroversion. Rhythm may reveal the brain’s capacity for sequencing complex movements reliably, and the efficiency and flexibility of the brain’s “central pattern generators”. Likewise, virtuosic performance of instrumental music may reveal motor coordination, capacity for automating complex learned behaviors, and having the time to practice (which in turn indicates not having heavy parental responsibilities already, and hence sexual availability). Melodic creativity may reveal learning ability to master existing musical styles and social intelligence to go beyond them in producing optimally exciting novelty. " (Miller 2000)
He mentions areas for future research at the end of the article and some of them I might be able to help with:

• the mate preferences people have concerning musical displays, and the inferences they make from manifest musical ability to underlying traits
• the sexual payoffs for different degrees of musicalitcy in tribal and modern populations.
  
• the perceptual and cognitive preferences people (and other apes) have with respect to many dimensions of musical stimuli
• the frequency distribution of actual musical productions with respect to those dimensions,
• whether there is strong assortative mating for musical traits
• whether there are genetic correlations between musical tastes and music-production tendencies in modern populations, which might indicate a runaway effect in progress
  

Its a bit of a bummer that creating aesthetically superlative musical performances satisfies a runaway evolutionary accident. Then again it all comes back to the bizarre accident of genetic reproduction and the links of genes as both reflections and manipulators of the environment.

Its all almost too much to grasp and leaves me breathless. Along the lines of the primacy of the gene, music can be seen as the penultimate demonstration of the complexities of life that are captured by genetic progress. I can live with this.