Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain-specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved instinct.
Criteria that aim to dichotomize cognition into rules and similarity are destined to fail because rules and similarity are not in genuine conflict. It is possible for a given cognitive domain to exploit rules without similarity, similarity without rules, or both (rules and similarity) at the same time.
Connectionist networks excel at extracting statistical regularities but have trouble extracting higher-order relationships. Clark & Thornton suggest that a solution to this problem might come from Elman (1993), but I argue that the success of Elman's single recurrent network is illusory, and show that it cannot in fact represent abstract relationships that can be generalized to novel instances, undermining Clark & Thornton's key arguments.
