Why Dating is Virtually Non-Existent at Midd

It's not because you have only 14 hours to read War and Peace, start to finish. It's not because the guy who sits in front of you in class hasn't showered in three weeks.

It's because binary mating is so inefficient.

Amanda Schaffer, a science and medical columnist for Slate magazine, writes,

"Consider the plight of single-celled green algae trying to hook up in a pond. At first glance, the lack of more than one mating choice among these algae seems strange. After all, if there were 10 equally prevalent types of mates, and a cell could fuse with any type other than its own, it would have nine shots in 10 of bumping into a potential partner just floating around blindly. If there were three mating types, its chances would drop to two in three. And with only two, they fall to one in two. In other words, assuming that it takes some effort to find a mate, the two-type system is 'the least efficient solution' for this population, says Laurence Hurst, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Bath."

Friends, consider the plight of the multi-celled Midd student trying to hook up in Ross dining hall: ain't gonna happen.