The Question of Dancing in Human Evolution

The role of this thesis will be to build a conceptual-empirical model of the emer-
gence of dance in human evolution and to test it through computational modelling.
The question we will be aiming to answer is to what extent can dance be considered
to have contributed to the development of human fitness and culture. If we define
fitness as a measure of the probability of a new generation, dance can only be
considered a positive contribution to fitness if it can be shown to have any devel-
opmental effects on behaviour in general. There is nothing in dance that directly
provides any more access to resources, protection from disease or from predators.
However, dance is significant as a motor-cognitive, as a social phenomenon, as a
universal feature of human cultures and as a self-justifying activity that depends
on types of mimesis; a fundament of culture in general. We will argue for the need
to resist reductionism when addressing the question of dance, that the answers to
its evolutionary significance lie in the fact that it is an activity where so many
domains of variation overlap. Dance has all the attributes of a cultural activity;
convention, mediation and internally constrained, while having all the attributes
of a spontaneous, emergent activity. It is necessary therefore to dedicate more
efforts to developing unified conceptual frameworks and to modify future research
with this goal in mind. If we remain confined to individual fields, an entire class of
questions of this nature will remain forever out of reach. Part of the paper will be
dedicated to mathematical and computational models of evolution. We will show
how mathematics can contribute to the building of a common framework and how
computational simulations can generate complementary data to answer questions
that by their very nature deal with very limited data sets.