The following are hypotheses generated by the framework's proposed account of sexuality as embodied intersubjective coupling and, in some contexts, reproduction. They are not direct consequences of the modal roles or established conclusions of evolutionary biology, psychology, or gender studies:

*Variation as a structural requirement; sexuality as a powerful recurrent solution.* The modal framework's commitment to ◇C as constitutive ([§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>)) commits any long-running lineage to some mechanism for tracking environmental change across generations. Variation is the structural requirement; how a lineage produces variation is open. Sexual reproduction is one such mechanism, and across complex multicellular eukaryotes it is the dominant recurrent solution: meiotic recombination supplies variation at rates mutation alone cannot match, and the population's variation-generation rate is what lets it track conditions across generations. But it is not the only solution, and not all life depends on it. Bacteria and archaea draw on horizontal gene transfer alongside mutation. Bdelloid rotifers have persisted across tens of millions of years apparently without conventional sex, drawing on alternative repair and gene-acquisition pathways (Gladyshev, Meselson, and Arkhipova 2008). Parthenogenetic and clonal lineages persist over shorter ranges. Whether sexuality is necessary for *any particular* lineage depends on the lineage's mutation rate, environmental volatility, and access to other variation channels. The framework does not pin sexuality as a modal necessity of life as such; it identifies it as the structural answer most closure-plus-throughput currents of sufficient complexity have converged on, given the demands of long-term continuation under changing conditions (Maynard Smith 1978; Otto 2009).

*Recurrent universality among complex lineages.* Among complex multicellular eukaryotes — animals, fungi, land plants — sexual reproduction is recurrent enough to be treated as the default mode, with apparent exceptions (some asexual lineages) requiring specific evolutionary explanations rather than the converse. The architecture supporting it varies across lineages; the recurrence is at the level of the structural problem coupling-for-variation solves, not at the level of any particular mechanism. Where asexuality persists at the lineage scale, the framework predicts compensating variation-generation pathways (high mutation rates, gene conversion, horizontal acquisition) carrying the load that recombination otherwise would.

*Affective registration at depth.* Sexuality takes affective form at the recursive depth that registers attraction. Below that depth it is mechanism (gametic fusion, mating tropisms); at that depth and above it is felt. The depth gradient [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) traces applies here as it does to other registers — chemical-gradient registration, perceptual registration, affective registration, reflective registration — each elaborating what the shallower depths already do.

*Identity construction at self-aware depth.* Some forms of sexual and gender identity involve a person’s reflective sense of themself in relation to others. The framework proposes that identity construction becomes possible with sufficient self-awareness. It does not establish that gender and sexual orientation are universally constructions of one specified recursive depth, and their ontological status remains a live philosophical and social question.

*Orientation variation, including its absence.* If orientation is the standing direction desire takes — drive ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)) shaped by attraction toward another — the framework predicts that this direction can vary in kind and can also fail to form. Asexuality is predicted as the case where drive runs and specializes in non-sexual directions but the sexual form of attraction, the toward-another sexual specialization, does not develop; libido may be present but undirected, and the reproductive register is untouched, since these are distinct registers on the account. Because sexuality is the lineage's dominant solution to the variation problem rather than a demand on any individual subject ([§8.6.5](<8.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)), the variant is predicted to occur without being a deficit of drive, and the self-model ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)) is predicted to construct a stable identity-position around it. The dissociability of the sexual, affiliative, and reproductive registers is itself the prediction: they should come apart in documented cases, which is what asexuality and aromanticism, together or separately, display.

*Coupling structure.* The framework treats dyadic mutual registration as a useful model for intimate interaction and interprets plural bonds as networks of multiple relations. This is a conceptual proposal, not a result that settles the ontology or ethics of monogamy, non-monogamy, marriage, or other relationship structures. Those questions also depend on culture, law, consent, power, and the preferences of the people involved.

*Sexual ethics as a special case of morality.* What one being owes another in intimate exchange is morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) where registration of one being by another is most complete. The same conditions that ground Morality apply with full force where the registration is most direct — consent, the readability of the other's affective broadcasts, the asymmetric vulnerability the body affords.

*Reproduction-choice as agency.* Reproduction-choice emerges as agency at the depth where a being can take the production of new lives as an object of its own reflection. Below that depth, reproduction is what coupling does; at that depth, it is what coupling can be chosen for, against, or differently. Reproduction-choice is an instance of modal depth in operation: the act becomes agency when the subject can hold possible futures open long enough to decide whether, when, and under what conditions another subject should come into being.


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← [8.6.2 What is Required](<8.6.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.6.4 What is Confirmed](<8.6.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
