Biological Vs. Cultural Evolution (language and Music)

Dan Everett recently posted this tweet:

Another definitional issue that keeps bothering me for no particularly good reason - people who study diachronic linguistics and call it “language evolution” vs. those who study human evolution and evidence for the initial appearance of language. #communitydefinedexpressions — Daniel Everett (@amazonrambler) November 16, 2018

I responded with the following string of tweets:

On the one hand we have the emergence of language as a phenomenon in biological evolution. That's clear enough. But we also have language change over longish time frames. Can we, should we, think of that as an evolutionary process as well? 1/X

I think so, but, yes, an argument is needed. More than can be put in tweets. But, it's about accounting: What entity is the recipient of, the target of, the evolutionary dynamic? In biological evolution it is, depending on POV, the phenotypic ... 2/X

individual, or (if you are a Dawkinsian) the gene. Dual inheritance theory is about biological evolution, where phenotypic individuals benefit from genetic inheritance and social learning. (Can benefits of social learning be toted up at the level of the gene?). 3/X

Dawkins' idea of the meme is that culture operates in an evolutionary domain where the evolutionary process benefits, not biological phenotypes or genes, but cultural entities he called memes. I think his insight is correct, but the explication of 4/X

meme has been thoroughly and badly botched (due in part to the indefatigable industry of Dan Dennett). I've published an article about music where I attempt to set things straight (more or less). 5/5

Here's that article: “Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture, https://www.academia.edu/23287434/_Rhythm_Changes_Notes_on_Some_Genetic_Elements_in_Musical_Culture.

Abstract: An entity known as Rhythm Changes is analyzed as a genetic entity in musical culture. Because it functions to coordinate the activities of musicians who are playing together it can be called a coordinator. It is a complex coordinator in that it is organized on five or six levels, each of which contains coordinators that function in other musical contexts. Musicians do not acquire (that is, learn) such a coordinator through “transfer” from one brain to another. Rather, they learn to construct it from publically available performance materials. This particular entity is derived from George Gershwin’s tune “I Got Rhythm” and is the harmonic trajectory of that tune. But it only attained independent musical status after about two decades of performances. Being a coordinator is thus not intrinsic to the entity itself, but is rather a function of how it comes to be used in the musical system. Recent argument suggests that biological genes are like this as well.