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X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995)

Duration: 50:26

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Xenopsychology by Robert A. Freitas Jr. (An Excerpt)

Emotions arc extremely important in human psychology activating our aggressiveness, sexual activity, learning and perception and a wide variety of other behaviors. Will ETs be more or less emotionally motivated than humans? Will they have emotions foreign to us, or are there any universal emotions?

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In the sociobiological view, both emotionality and behavior evolve as strategies to maximize the spread of genes. Thus the mammalian limbic brain system has been programmed to perform as if it knows that its underlying genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction and altruism.

Consider parental love. Sociobiologists believe that love is a behavioral predisposition with selective advantages for organisms which (1) are warm-blooded (love induces close physical contact permitting shared body warmth for small, high-heat-loss young), (2) produce relatively small numbers of offspring (love encourages parents to make a larger investment in time and resources per child ). (3) produce offspring that are helpless at birth (love ensures parental material support essential for infant survival), and (4) have highly plastic intelligence (love drives the parent to teach offspring very complex behaviors). Love is rare in the animal kingdom -- only birds and mammals fulfill these requirements on Earth, and only these species experience the emotion. So parent love likely won't be a part of the psychology, of intelligent ETs unless they satisfy at least some of the above criteria. (To be continued).

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