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participation. That being said, readers should indeed proceed with a bit of caution. I will second Harvey’s own concerns about evolutionary arguments, and will add here that this is not merely a problem of missing information, but fundamentally a conceptual problem of allowing the particular social and cultural situation of the present to influence our justification of the past. Evolutionary claims, including Harvey’s, are predicated on the idea that musical capacity is universal, and thus natural. Music’s natural characteristics are then linked to biological features, providing a mechanism for heritability necessary for evolutionary theories. Harvey argues that music provides, among other things, a mechanism for social cohesion and emotional regulation. Indeed, such functions are demonstrably important for human wellbeing, and music evidently promotes them, so music may have imbued a selective advantage on the organisms whose descendants are reading this book review. There is nothing obviously objectionable about such logic, and such inquiry serves to unite different strands of scientific discourse on music (e.g., by linking behavioral capacities with anatomical, physiological, and genetic correlates). However, in order to construct this kind of argument, some particular understanding of what constitutes ‘‘music’’ must be chosen. One question I would encourage the reader to keep in mind is how modular music really is as a behavior or capacity, and how malleable the concept is by the contexts of history and culture. What are the essential features for something to be music? What are its essential effects on human cognition and behavior? Indeed, friends and family in one’s immediate sphere often do not even agree on what counts as ‘‘music’’! An evolutionary argument must identify some universal features, and music is diverse and flexible enough as a behavior to accommodate several possible theories (e.g., we might be concerned with pitch schematization, metrical entrainment, emotional regulation, or other features). In this way, evolutionary theories do not really describe the selective advantage of ‘‘music,’’ but rather some subset of features that a particular theory deems to be the essential ones. This does not make the evolutionary reasoning wrong, per se, and it can still explain quite a lot, but it should also not be mistaken for a complete picture of what music is or means, or the many things it could possibly be or mean. In some ways, Harvey is very sensitive to this diversity and ubiquity of music in the human condition, but in other ways, Harvey overlooks the cultural diversity of music’s structures, practices, and meanings. In sum, Harvey offers an impressive synthesis of scientific literature on music and offers some insights into the value and origins of musical capacities in humans. The book provides a good overview of scientific research on music and language, but perhaps ought to be read in tandem with sociological, ethnomusicological, and critical literatures that challenge assumptions of a common use and experience of music.