Today is Valentine’s Day, which means my science news feed was buzzing with all sort of “love” related articles, from a paleobiologist that sneaked a marriage proposal in the acknowledgments section of his paper (Article 1), to researchers trying to cryopreserve coral sperm (this one sounds romantic).
I’ll try to sneak in a love-related science news in my post as well. It’s just not very new and just very weird, that’s why I am talking about it.
In 2010, Peter Backus was a professor at the University of Warwick in UK, at the time he had been single for a while and he turned to science to understand why.
Although he could have resorted to science to synthesize some potent synthetic pheromones, he instead opted for math and calculated the chances of finding his significant half (Article 3, Article 4).
Peter modified an old equation that was developed in 1961 by the astronomer Frank Drake in the attempt to estimate a possible number of alien civilizations that could exist in our galaxy (Book 1).
Peter modified the equation in the following way:
He considered that near London at the time, lived 4 million women but only 20% of these were included in the age range between 24-34. So, the total so far went down to 800,000 girls. Obviously, not all girls would be available, so Peter estimated that 50% of girls were single or 400,000 girls.
How many of these girls would have a University degree? About 26%, or 104,000 girls. How many of these girls would be attractive? Here the number went down considerably, Peter thought that only 5% of educated women would be attractive (he must be a picky guy). So the number went down to 5,200 girls. Now he also asked the opposite question and estimated that among these, only 5% of these girls would find him attractive, bringing the number down to 260 girls.
Finally, he though he would get along only with about 10% of these, so the final number of girls went down to 26.
So, in the whole London area, Peter estimated that he had only 26 possible girls he could date. Considering that the chances of finding alien life in our galaxy were only 100 times lower, Peter had a pretty grim situation.
In my personal opinion, Peter had seriously underestimated how many girls he could find attractive and he did not add into the equation alcohol, drinks are proven to make people more attractive in the eyes of the drinker, at least temporarily.
The final proof that his numbers did not make sense was the fact that immediately after publishing his letter, he started dating someone and in 2014 got married. Sometimes it is better not to rationalize everything, emotions and love are among those. They are actually the catalysts for irrational behaviors.
Love gives men strength, often at the cost of his mind