Behavioral Ecology Blog

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that humans frequently have mating strategies that are not charcterized by exclusivity.

Slightly more than half of all students reported having sexual intercourse, a rate comparable to the national average. The researchers mapped the network structure of the 573 students involved in a romantic or sexual relationship.

Moody said the results generate a snapshot of the network of romantic and sexual relations among teens attending the school in this 18-month period –- the first such image of an entire population such as this.

The most striking feature of the network was a single component that connected 52 percent (288) of the romantically involved students at Jefferson. This means student A had relations with student B, who had relations with student C and so on, connecting all 288 of these students.

While this component is large, it has numerous short branches and is very broad – the two most distant individuals are 37 steps apart. (Or to use a currently popular term, there were 37 degrees of separation between the two most-distant students.)

“From a student’s perspective, a large chain like this would boggle the mind,” Moody said. “They might know that their partner had a previous partner. But they don’t think about the fact that this partner had a previous partner, who had a partner, and so on.

“What this shows, for the first time, is that there are many of these links in a chain, going far beyond what anyone could see and hold in their head.”

Notice that these data are clearly biased downward, and that the magnitude of promiscuity, and the frequency of reticulation in the network map is probably much greater. I did notice that there are2 reported homosexual encounter (1 of each type).

On a more serious note, think about the implications of the length of the primary chain and disease spread. There is rampant promiscuity, which is an infectious disease “best case scenario”. It is clear that what ever type of sex education these people were receiving is not adecuate. I am not in favor of teaching abstinence, but I am in favor of teacing self respect and moderation- both of which is CLEARLY lacking in these teens…

See the whole story here, and a few other posts on human mating systems here, and here.