Steven Pinker's 1997 verdict that music is evolutionary byproduct, pure pleasure technology with no survival function. The most contested dessert in cognitive science.
Documented
The claim and its pedigree
How the Mind Works, 1997, page 534: music shows no signs of design for attaining survival goals, could vanish from the species without changing the rest of our lifestyle, and is best described as auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties. Pinker was extending a lineage: William James in 1890 called music a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system that entered the mind by the back stairs.
Assessment: Fully documented. Pinker has restated the position without retreat, noting that everyone becomes a Darwinian adaptationist when the subject is music. The cheesecake is the rare scientific metaphor that became the target it described.
Stories
The adaptationist counterfire
The response is an entire subfield: social bonding, per Savage, Mehr, and colleagues' global song studies; mate choice, per Geoffrey Miller; infant soothing; coalition signaling. Jordania's battle trance model has early humans singing in rhythm to repel predators and fuse the group into one fearless body. And in 2009 Patel's team showed Snowball the cockatoo synchronizing to a beat across tempo shifts, odds against chance of 500 to 1, evidence that beat perception rides on vocal-learning circuitry, not on cheesecake.
Assessment: Documented as published science. What is not documented is a winner: the 2021 Behavioral and Brain Sciences double issue ran adaptation and byproduct positions side by side, and the field called it unresolved.
Interesting claims
The dessert is load-bearing
Attali wrote the inversion twenty years before Pinker: music is prophecy, the structure that arrives before the society it announces, the code in which new orders rehearse. On this reading the whole byproduct debate is inverted: the thing cognitive science filed as garnish is the part carrying the load. A culture's cheesecake is its constitution, rehearsed in advance.
Assessment: Interesting: Attali's Noise (1977, English 1985) argues it at length and unfalsifiably. That music precedes social change is a pattern anyone can collect; whether the pattern is cause is the claim. Filed where claims that cannot lose live.
Sources and further reading
Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), p. 534, the cheesecake passage
James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), the incidental peculiarity
Patel et al., Snowball the cockatoo, Current Biology (2009)
Savage et al. and Mehr et al., the paired adaptation essays, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2021)
Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977; English 1985)
Worth asking
If music is useless frosting, why does every known culture bake it, and why can a cockatoo keep time to the Backstreet Boys?