Music is a human universal and, as such, it has evolutionary roots that must be investigated within the natural history of our phylogenetic changes. Theories in extended cognition suggest that what we call “mind” is a process associated with a flow of information between brain, body, and environment. Technology is, in this sense, part of the process, and not simply the product of cerebral activity. In humans, neuroplasticity may have enhanced the ability to integrate tools into the body balance and, subsequently, into the neural body scheme. Musical instruments would be, in this case, peripheral devices, employed to delegate and extend perceptual and cognitive functions to extrasomatic elements. Many musical instruments require a consistent structural integration with the body, involving proprioceptive, exteroceptive, and interoceptive integration. The human capacity to integrate body and technology (a so-called “prosthetic ability”) can have facilitated the transformation of exotelic behaviors, associated with tool use and finalistic production, into autotelic behaviors, associated with individual reward and collective bonds. The body becomes even part of the musical instrument itself, further blending the emotional and social aspects. Interpreting the origin of music in terms of embodiment can offer a complementary view of our technological and artistic abilities that, beyond tool use and toolmaking, accounts for a preliminary (and crucial) component: tool sensing.
Evolutionary theory is formally compatible with substrate-neutral formulations of variation, inheritance, and selection, yet many standard operational models remain calibrated to biological reproduction. External storage is situated within a broader continuum of retention architectures spanning ecological, symbiotic, inscribed, and digital inheritance. Once the persistence of selected variation no longer depends exclusively on parent–offspring transmission, the conditions of retention must be specified explicitly. Accumulation is the retention of selected variants as starting points for later variation and selection; it is not cumulative improvement. When this retention is realized across substrates, some control over persistence shifts to properties of retaining media, a shift intensified by human external storage. By keeping earlier variants available for later uptake, external storage enables path-dependent trajectories; cumulative ratchets arise only under particular parameter configurations. Five parameters—retention fidelity, durability, access-breadth, direct modifiability, and reproductive decoupling—explain variation in retention architecture. Their configuration can support selection effects beyond biological generations, substrate-crossing inheritance, retention trajectories partially decoupled from biological generation time, and time-scale plasticity. The framework complements niche construction theory and the extended evolutionary synthesis by specifying how substrate properties reorganize retention and when external inheritance can sustain cumulative change across biological generations. It also identifies four diagnostic conditions for a further substrate transition: endogenous variant generation, evaluation, and revision; internally sustained maintenance with preserved fidelity; continued access across the relevant selection population; and substantial decoupling from human life cycles and organizational succession.
Philosophy of biology widely acknowledges that taxonomic practice conditions the delimitation of species; however, this impact has remained predominantly theoretical, lacking precise formal quantification. This article presents a mathematical framework utilizing morphospaces to model this influence across three hierarchical levels: the theoretical morphospace ( Ω ), encompassing the combinatorially possible; the ontological morphospace ( Ω _O ), a subset of the theoretical morphospace constrained by biological viability; and the epistemic morphospace ( Ω _E ), a quotient space of the ontological morphospace defined by taxonomic rules. By treating diagnostic criteria as logical constraints, it becomes possible to quantify the impact of taxonomic decisions on both the number of recognized species and the information cost within the system. Furthermore, the necessary conditions for treating systematics as a formal problem are established. Finally, the critical importance of adopting objective and computable diagnostic criteria to ensure greater rigor in biodiversity classification is highlighted.
About one hundred years ago, the law of homologous series, a sweeping generalization proposed by N. I. Vavilov at a plant breeders’ congress, caused a sensation, so much so that the audience thought they had witnessed the unveiling of something as revolutionary as the periodic table of Mendeleev. Vavilov postulated that the enormous diversity observable in plant forms masked an underlying similarity, one revealed in parallel variations among closely or distantly related plants. In the present article, we consider the law of homologous series from a historical viewpoint and conclude that its unveiling deserves to be recognized as a foundational event in evolutionary developmental biology.
