Passage Summary: An anthropologist argues that because almost everyone in the world uses the same few musical scales despite living in very different cultures, our preference for those scales must be hard-wired into our brains rather than learned.

Conclusion: The widespread popularity of diatonic musical scales is solely the result of innate human mental characteristics.

Reasoning: If social conditioning were the cause, the diversity of social systems would lead to a diverse mix of scales, but diatonic scales dominate globally.

Analysis: The anthropologist is making a bit of a leap here, assuming that if culture doesn't explain our musical tastes, biology is the only suspect left in the room. This 'either-or' logic ignores the possibility that other factors—perhaps the mathematical properties of sound itself—could be the culprit. We should look for an answer that highlights this failure to consider alternative explanations beyond just 'nature versus nurture.' The argument's vulnerability lies in its rigid exclusion of any third possibility.