Your Weekly Attenborough: Cichlidogyrus attenboroughi

A parasite looking for love.

By Nathaniel Scharping
May 12, 2018 2:14 AMFeb 11, 2020 8:48 PM
Cichlidogyrus-attenboroughi.jpg
Cichlidogyrus attenboroughi. (Credit: Nikol Kmentová)

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Let's talk about soul mates. It's a nice concept, but functionally unworkable. There are just too many people out there for any one person you meet to be "the one." In reality, it's probably more like "one of roughly several million people, some marginally better than others."

And if we take the thought experiment at face value and assume that there were truly just one soul mate for each of us, our odds of finding them end up at around a hundredth of a percent even with some fairly strict limits imposed, as Randall Munroe of xkcd demonstrates.

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