Mathematicians Explain: Why Not on the First Date
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Sounds like Numb3rs meet theJournal of Theoretical Biology:
From a female’s point of view, males are not all equal. A female would like to mate with a good male, but cannot tell a male’s type from his appearance alone. The strategic problem the female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play. A male is assumed to always want to mate with a female, but a good male is more willing to pay the cost of a long courtship in order to claim the prize of mating. This leads to an outcome in which the female is not willing to mate immediately, but instead requires the male to wait for an indeterminate time before she agrees to mate with him.
Game Theory Explains Why You Can’t Hurry Love
Evolutionary biologists have long thought something similar might be true. In the modern age there are plenty of women who don’t want long courtships. Thank god for birth control.
