Not necessarily; the determining factors in fertility could just as easily be on the autosomal chromosomes (the of which nearly everyone gets one copy from each parent, and aren't involved in sex determination). Given that these chromosomes make up most of our genomes, in fact, you'd kind of expect that.

It concerns me that there's a growing distrust of medicine.
It's not medicine, it's science, and it's a phenomenon that's common across the anglo countries.

[snort] Kid, I know a hell of a lot more about my body--and your body, and everyone else's body--than you ever will. And while I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about network engineering as I am about biology and medicine, I know enough to know how complex it is. So do the MIT researchers, for that matter, else they wouldn't be using the approach they are. We don't need genetic algorithms and the like to model simple systems.

The best thing to do here would be acknowledge that you said something dumb--it's okay, everyone does sometimes--and move on. Instead you're trying to defend an indefensible position, and making a fool of yourself by doing so. Just let it go.

If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming?
Both terms are accurate. Where's the problem ?

I know perfectly well that it's not "arcane magic," any more than living organisms are. It's just a very big, very complex system doing interesting and not-always-predictable things, and well worth studying as such. If you think you have some insight into the behavior of TCP that the MIT researchers lack, by all means you should let them know, or publish it yourself.

I also know you're a jackass who will do no such thing, just keep talking shit. No further study required.

The models I build are on the cellular level. There are people working in various kinds of population and ecological modeling, but that's out of my area. I do know that, necessarily, they simplify out a lot of what the individual organisms are doing.

If you insist that we know why something works before we make use of it, you're discarding a large portion of engineering. We're still nowhere near a complete understanding of the laws of physics, and yet we make machines that operate quite nicely according to the laws we do know (or at least, of which we have reasonable approximations). The same goes for the relationship between medicine and basic biology, and probably for lots of other stuff as well.

I don't think anyone's talking about letting go of the curiosity. They're not saying, "It works, let's just accept that and move on," but rather, "It works, and we might as well make use of it while we're trying to understand it." Or, from TFA: "Remy's algorithms have more than 150 rules, and will need to be reverse-engineered to figure out how and why they work. We suspect that there is considerable benefit to being able to combine window-based congestion control with pacing where appropriate, but we'll have to trace through these things as they execute to really understand why they work."

I am a scientist--specifically, a bioinformaticist, which means I try to build mathematical and computational models of processes in living organisms, which are kind of the canonical example of complex systems. And I will cheerfully admit that the internet, taken as a whole, is at least as complex as anything I deal with.

Like I said: chest-thumping. [shrug] I hope you're enjoying it, because it's all you're ever going to do.

You're right, of course, but I think it's pretty clear it was worse for the losers, as usually happens.

One large group of Americans was clearly better off after the war than they were before it. For a while, at least, until the losers started acting like they hadn't really lost, and the winners unwisely let them get away with it. A century and a half later, we're still not done sorting that out.

No, I'm suggesting that not more than a tiny fraction of those 300 million would actually engage in armed, organized resistance against the government of the United States. And you may recall that the last time even a not-so-tiny fraction tried, it didn't end well for them.

There's a story from Desert Storm about an Iraqi commander who, when asked why he surrendered his unit so quickly, said it was because of the B-52 strikes.

"But your position wasn't hit by B-52's," the puzzled interrogator said.

"No," he replied, "but I saw one that was."

It's easy to talk big about what you would do. Once you saw the results if the US government decided to go all-out on Deer Trail, you might not be quite so inclined toward chest-thumping.

A military is either at war, training for war, or a lousy military. I don't know of any fourth option.

How exactly did you do that? If you mean you just put in your time and didn't re-enlist, you have to know that's not the same thing as walking off the job.

My point is that people like this are a minority in the military, and are generally despised by those who have to put up with them, whereas they absolutely dominate corporate culture.

Okay, I'll try to explain it again. My three main points:

1. Business is not war, because under normal circumstances, business does not involve killing people. Microsoft is not going to bomb Google's headquarters. Target submarines are not going to stalk ships carrying goods for Wal-Mart. Ford is not going to dispatch a battalion to move into a GM plant, kill or take prisoner all the GM employees found there, and hold the plant against attempts to take it back.

2. Corporations are not armies. The most obvious difference is that corporate employees can always walk away. Plenty of people stay with jobs they dislike for financial reasons, of course, but as a rule, in the civilian world your boss can't send you to jail--or put you up against a wall and shoot you!--if you say "to hell with this, I quit." Soldiers don't have that option, nor could armies function if they did.

3. The types of people involved are different. There are plenty of people in the military, especially officers but a fair number of NCOs as well, who are primarily concerned with climbing the career ladder. Some of them even get MBAs! And they tend to be really lousy soldiers. In peacetime, they're a constant irritation, and in wartime, they get people killed for no good reason. If Uncle Sam's training can't knock the self-absorption and amorality out of these people, where there are a lot fewer of them than there are in the typical corporate environment, it seems unlikely that some bizarre watered-down civilian version will do so, especially when they work in an environment where sociopathy is rewarded and any genuine concern for the welfare of your subordinates is regarded as weakness.

So there it is. Have I said anything above that you disagree with?

Maybe everyone should stop using a lousy movie as a guide to real-world debates about medical ethics.