Do Extraterrestrials Have Sex (and Intelligence)?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thought experiment addresses the range of possible evolved psychologies likely to be associated with extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence. The analysis rests on: (1) a number of assumptions shared by the SETI project; (2) recent arguments concerning convergent evolution; and (3) current theories of how intelligence evolved in our own species. It concludes that, regardless of how and which cognitive abilities arise initially, extraterrestrially they can develop into intelligence only if an amplification process involving a form of predation and/or sexual selection occurs. Depending on the amplification process, ETs may be xenophobic; however, it is more probable that they will be ethnocentric. Their ideas of reciprocity and fairness are likely to at least overlap with our own. They will definitely be culture-bearing and probably have two sexes, both of which are intelligent. Regardless of the degree of physical similarity of ETs to ourselves, convergence makes it likely that we will at least find their evolved psychology similar enough to our own for comprehension.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it