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Blasco Máñez Teresa | Other
2013-09-01 - 2014-06-30 | Research area: Other
Biological Foundations of Music and Language: a Comparative Structural Approach
The evolutionary study of language and music has traditionally been addressed within the context of a selectionist framework, in which the emphasis placed on the functional uniqueness of mechanisms too often obscures parallels at the level of organic structure on which evolutionary accounts should be grounded. The main objective of my PhD project is to approach a comparison of the evolutionary biology of music and language as cognitive capacities following a structural (non-functionalist), internalist perspective, where data from different levels of organisation (developmental, anatomical, genetic) become integrated in order to establish homologies and degrees of continuity. One of the central concerns of my work is thus to place the discussion about these capacities within a realistic, theoretically-informed and biology-grounded framework, by incorporating from biology the basic principles of modern evolutionary theory. In this sense, my project owes much to works previously carried out within the context of the research group leaded by Guillermo Lorenzo and Sergio Balari (to which my PhD project is associated), in turn influenced by the work of EvoDevo biologists such as Pere Alberch.