The mozart effect - Testing the arousal hypothesis
People on the edge of starvation will rarely if ever display enlightened activities in relationship to their environment or each other, as they battle for survival. Early farmers could see the effects of deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion, but gentle, sustainable practices were often defeated by market forces, imperial prerogatives, and warfare. What could be obvious to farmers was not evident to potentates sitting on distant urban thrones, merchants, or money-changers, and as the city conquered what became the hinterland, short-term economic plunder took precedence over long-term environmental management far too frequently.
What evidence do the researchers offer as a test of their hypothesis

THE MOZART EFFECT: EVIDENCE FOR THE AROUSAL HYPOTHESIS
But the most impressive dual-use innovation in mollusks is what cephalopods invented. Their gill pumps are quite muscular and . That . Jet propulsion is not an energy-efficient means of transportation, but the cephalopod’s ability to pass oxygen-bearing water over its gills is unmatched. Cephalopods can live in waters too hypoxic for fish to survive. In the coming Ordovician Period, cephalopods would be apex predators of marine biomes and would hold that distinction for a long time. Cephalopods are today’s ; the and it has the largest brain-to-body-size ratio of all invertebrates. It is thought that the skills needed for predation stimulated cephalopodan intelligence. Today, the is the only survivor of that lineage of Ordovician apex predators.
The Mozart effect: evidence for the arousal hypothesis.
Just as the aftermath of the appearance of complex life was uninteresting from a , as the amazingly diverse energy-generation strategies of archaea and bacteria were almost totally abandoned in favor of aerobic respiration, biological solutions to the problems that complex life presented were greatest during the Cambrian Explosion, and everything transpiring since then has been relatively insignificant. Animals would never see that level of innovation again. While investigating those eonic changes, many scientists have realized that the dynamics of those times might have been quite different from today’s, as once again may be of limited use for explaining what happened. Also, scientists generally use a rule-of-thumb called , or parsimony, which states that with all else being equal, simpler theories are preferred. , a seminal theorist regarding the scientific method, as they were easier to falsify. However, this issue presents many problems, and in recent times, theories of or speciation have invoked numerous interacting dynamics. Einstein noted that the more elegant and impressive the math used to support a theory, the less likely the theory depicted reality. Occam’s Razor has also become an unfortunate dogma in various circles, particularly , in which the of materialism and establishment science are defended, and often quite irrationally. Simplicity and complexity have been seesawing over the course of scientific history as fundamental principles. The recent trend toward multidisciplinary syntheses has been generally making hypotheses more complex and difficult to test, although and ever-increasing and more precise data makes the task more feasible than ever, at least situations in which are not interfering.
