By MAN WITH STICK
Added: Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:15:47 UTC

Hello, i was baby sitting my nephew the other day who is 9 months old and i had the music video channels on in the background. An old Michael Jackson song came on the tv (billie jean, i think?) and Ethan pulled himself up on his jungle mind gym thing and started to bop up and down independent of me encouraging or suggesting in some way he should 'dance'. This continued for a few songs then stopped. It was really weird but funky.

It made me think, why would a baby know how to respond to music? Apparently this is quite a common phenomenon, i did a bit of research and found a paper by some psychology boffs who concluded,

'The findings, based on the study of infants aged between five months and two years old, suggest that babies may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music.

We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music the more they smiled.' - The findings are published March 15 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2010

Question: What would be the evolutionary benefit of dancing rhythmically? Did humans use to have a mating ritual like other animals that involved a display of some kind? Was dancing an addition to something else that was selected for? I would like to hear people's suggestions.

TAGGED: BEHAVIOR, EVOLUTION, GENETICS