A growing range of scholars across the sciences and humanities are
theorizing that the human capacity for music has been shaped over
evolutionary time by an interplay between cultural invention and biological
evolution (gene-culture coevolution). In this presentation I will apply
this theoretical framework to the human capacity to synchronize movements
to an auditory beat perceived in complex rhythmic patterns. I will present
a hypothesis which argues that 1) an advanced form of vocal learning acted
as a preadaptation for sporadic beat perception and synchronization,
providing intrinsic rewards for predicting the temporal structure of
complex acoustic sequences; and 2) in humans, mechanisms of gene-culture
coevolution transformed this preadaptation into a genuine neural adaptation
for sustained beat perception and synchronization. The larger significance
of this proposal is that it outlines a hypothesis of cognitive gene-culture
coevolution which makes testable predictions for neuroscience,
cross-species studies, and genetics.