William Gates was waiting in the wings, and he signed a deal to give IBM an operating system.
Actually IBM came to Gates first, hoping they could get MS-BASIC and CPM. At that point Microsoft was selling as many copies of CPM-80 as DRI because of their CPM Soft-Card for the Apple II. However, Microsoft couldn't transfer its CPM license, so Gates sent IBM on to Kildall. Kildall was initially unavailable, so his wife met with the IBM reps. She and the company lawyer were quite reasonably put off by IBM's onerous non-disclosure agreement and decided not to take the risk of signing. Eventually Kildall did meet with IBM but couldn't agree on a deal. See for example Fire in the Valley This doesn't sound terribly unethical to me: Microsoft was simply willing to assume a risk that DRI wasn't.
An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it. PC-DOS was that clone
Only in the same sense that "Linus Torvalds stole the ideas of UNIX and created a free clone of it. Linux was that clone". Are you alleging that Patterson lifted copyrighted code from CPM? Do you have any evidence of that? And of course Dr. Kildall derived many of CPM's features from DEC operating sytems.
Kildall got nothing and drowned in his own bitterness. In the later years of his life, he drank himself into alcoholism and eventually died in a bar.
Dr. Kildall's death was very sad, and he was a great contributer to the software industry. However, at the time of the IBM deal DRI was a well established company, and IBM did sell CPM-86 for the IBM PC as well as MS-DOS. Dr. Kildall did make quite a bit of money when DRI was sold to Novell. See for example Gary Kildall.
Show me on scientific study that proved a beneficial mutation of a species?
Sure: the mutation that causes sickle cell disease. This is a single base change to a hemeglobin gene. If you get two copies of it you get sickle cell disease. If you get one copy of it you'll be resistant to malaria. There will always be more people who have once copy rather then two copies, so the net effect is beneficial. How about a mutation that increases longevity in mice and worms? These are just a couple of the more spectacular examples from off the top of my head. Consult any text on genetics for more examples.
I disagree. The 'flow' of the program should be made clear by clean, consistently formatted code. However, the 'why' of the program can remain obscure no matter how experienced the programmer or how well formatted the code. That (in my opinion) is what the comments are for.
As an example, two or three times now I've come back to code I'd written years ago, and found some incredibly lame paragraph of code that seemed to do things in a very roundabout way. The structure of the code was clear, so I promptly re-wrote it to be more straightforward and efficient. Things immediately went to hell, and after hours of struggling, I re-discovered what had prompted me to write the lame code in the first place: a bug in an API call. If I had just inlcuded a comment that said (at the least)
// Warning - this code works around a known bug in the // FooBar() call
I could have saved myself several hours. I actually had put comments in the code, but they were the useless sort like: "loop over all instances" or "test for valid pointer".
There is no knowing from the brief news article, but I wonder if they filtered out deaths from diseases that cause wasting? It seems to me that if they included a significant number of deaths from AIDS or cancer it might make it look like being underweight was unhealthy when in fact low weight and death would both be consequences of the underlying disease.
I am for medicine advances, all for research, but when it comes to changing DNA, I see a red flag. I think that even our brightest people are not able to consider all the potential ramifications.
This attititude puzzles me. It seems to ascribe some sort of benevolent intelligence to nature, and makes DNA into a message from the Platonic realms, letting us know "HOW THINGS ARE MEANT TO BE". But nature is not benevolent, mutations are a random process, and our DNA is just a large molecule forged by interaction of those random mutations with differential reproductive success. It isn't laying up clever mutations for a rainy day.
I'm sure DNA therapy will have long term unforseen consequences, but then so did the invention of antibiotics. I don't understand your basis for distinguishing between the two. I suppose you could have a religious belief that mutations are sent by god, but then so is Y. pestis.
Beyond AI, I have a very difficult time coming up with CompSci advances in the last decade. The BWT algo, Bayesian Filters, and that's about where I run out.
There is a difference between saying that you don't know of any important CompSci advances and saying that there have been no such advances. What field do you work in? What other fields do you follow? What research journals do you read on a regular basis? If you are just reading textbooks and the popular and semi-popular press you are only going to hear about the ideas that have been pretty well thrashed out in the research literature and so are probably already 5-10 years old.
How about the entire field of non-supervised machine learning: support vector machines, and training of hidden Markov models? These methods are finding application in everything from spam filtering to speech recognition to genome analysis.
Labs want people who can code a bit, not people who understand the fundamentals of designing operating systems. Mathematics, statistics, and scripting
Yes and no. Knowing a little perl is terrifically useful for bench people, but if you are working on shrink-wrap software or even programs for general use by the biological community issues of software engineering and algorithmic efficiency become important. The exciting thing about computational biology is that it is the meeting point of 3 vast edifices of technology: molecular biology, statistical inference, and computer science. It works best if the biologists recognize how little they now about computer science, the computer scientists recognize how little they know about biology, and both recognize how little they know about statistical inference.
From what I've seen, I'd say that math is only useful if you plan to get a Ph.D and be a mathematician. I suppose actuaries do alright, if you like statistics.
This is too pessimistic. There are positions in bioinformatics and biostatistics that can make good use of people with a background in both math and cs. Statisics is the key subject for these fields too, but you're applying it to biological problems rather then financial ones.
It is an attitude unfortunately typical of a young person trained in physics or math. I'm speaking with a blush here because I remember saying similar things 20 years ago.
My original education was in physics but years later I got a B.S. in chemistry. The physical chemistry classes were relatively easy, though by no means a cinch. Synthetic organic chemistry blew my mind: terrificly hard puzzles that couldn't be framed in terms of math. I've since encountered similar depths in genetics. I still love physics and math, but I no longer accept Rutherford's claim that all science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Oh good, well I guess there's no point in doing anything that somebody else has thought about but never done - oh wait - that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard.
Once day back in the 70's I was sitting in the college computer lab studying C and I realized I could write a program that would simulate the login prompt and steal passwords. I turned to the guy next to me, who was a much sharper coder then I was, and shared my revelation. His response: "Of course, any moron could do that. But what kind of asshole invests a hour of his time just to fuck with other people when he could be writing something useful?" That pretty much killed my interest in writing security exploits.
His computer was logged in and it sent a transfer request.
Is this true? I went back and double checked the article and as far as I could tell the article doesn't state that the the wire request came from Mr. Lopez's computer. Of course it doersn't say that it didn't come from Mr. Lopez's compute either. In fact the article doesn't contain much beyond the claims of the law suit.
This whole thread seems to be mistaking assertion for fact.
As far as I can tell from the linked Symatec information the virus turns your computer into a DOS zombie controled over IRS. It doesn't say anything about installing a keystroke logger. The Secret Service investigation is not claiming that the virus was behind the fraudulent transfer. It simply noted the infection as a fact of the investigation.
According to the article Mr. Lopez frequently makes wire transfers (albeit not to Latvia), so I'm not sure why everyone is leaping to the conclusion that this was done by clever cyber criminals and not business associates, customers, or bank employees. It may very well be, but the article contains no evidence to support the claim.
So both ideas suffer from this problem, not just Creationism
Agreed, neither scientific nor religious thought can answer this question.
God could just exist without being created
But why is it any more satisfactory to say "Life was created by God, and God exists without being created" then to simply say "Life exists without being created"? Both statements require accepting that some thing could exist without being created, but the first statement introduces an additional entity, namely God. Occam's Razor tells us not to multiply entities needlessly, so what are your grounds for choosing the former over the latter?
Not to beat the point into the ground, but on what logical basis do you choose among the following statments:
"Life exists without being created" "Life was created by God, and God exists without being created" "Life was created by the demiurge, the demiurge was created by God, and God exists without being created"
You make it sound like there is some organization of rich folks that meets weekly in smoke filled rooms to discuss and plot the downfall of the middle class.
Not at all. The rich folks meet daily in smoke filled rooms to discuss and plot the advancement of their friends and families. The effect is similar, but it doesn't require believing in some sort of malign conspiracy, just very common human values.
I recommend reading "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/002750.ht m. It is Lewis's account of working as a trader for Salomon Brothers. I read it just as I was becoming a small investor. The most eye opening incident was Lewis's account of one of the "big guys" coming out on to the trading floor and telling all the "little guys" that they were going to shove some bonds down the throats of their little customers, because the bonds were dogs, and his big customers needed to unload them. Similar attitudes were behind the recent mutual fund scandals. It's not that they particularly want to screw small investors, its just that they want to protetct their important customers. Unfortunately the effect on the middle class is usually the same in the end.
f you feel that we came about by a brute force algorithm, they love you. It's silly that hackers will accept an idea as illogical that something as complicated as cells just came about by chance. I don't use a brute force algorithm to program, I design it.
Two questions and a link:
1. If the complexity of the natural world is evidence of intelligent design, then isn't the necessary complexity of the designer evidence that the designer was designed? Isn't this an example of the mutlipication of entitities that Occam warned against? I'm not trying to be flip here, this is a sincere question.
for those who are money oriented, look to see lawyering as MUCH more lucrative. Yet , it produces NOTHING
Spoken like someone who has never had to go to a legal system to redress an injustice. You could equally say that cancer surgeons create no wealth. Perhaps you'd prefer that we return to trial by combat?
It just isn't as simple as "scientists good", "lawyers bad". There are saintly lawyers and charlatan scientists. Science is a high risk, high return activity largely paid for by taxation. You assert that we need more scientists but can you marshall arguments that will convinice your fellow citizens to pony up the bucks?
I truly wonder why you think it is a misconception. It's not some urban legend or "rumors on the internets." The National Science Board is worried about it (NYTimes article here). It's a serious problem that a lot of people (e.g., the US government) are working on.
Because similar reports have been issued in the past about impending shortages of scientists and have mostly come to naught except for producing a bunch of Ph.D.'s bitter about their limited job prospects. Take a look at the employment outlook for Ph.D. mathematicians http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos043.htm/. Much as in pro-sports there is a huge demand for scientists of exceptional talent, but not much demand for those of modest talent.
Don't get me wrong, it is a privilige to study for a Ph.D. in the sciences. Students who love and show talent in a field should be encouraged to consider graduate study. It should never be suggested though that a graduate degree in science is a guarantee of stable employment (as it would be if there were a genuine shortage).
Re:A Nobel Laureate's Pro-Cold Fusion Lecture
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DOE Report on Cold Fusion
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· Score: 2, Interesting
likening the situation to the initial rejection of Alfred Wegener's continental drift proposal, despite the overwhelming evidence for it
My wife, a geologist who's hobby is the history of science, tells me that the evidence for Wegener's continental drift proposal was intriguing and suggestive, but by no means overwhelming, at least until the magnetic mapping of the mid-Atlantic ridge was done, many years after Wegener's death.
The idea that a yeast changing a single genes, sometimes a single nucleotide of DNA, is the same as a species completely reorganizing its genome and becoming a new species that is both genetically and morphologically unique from it's parent is macroevolution.
As far as I can tell this distinction between micro and macro evolution only seems to come from creationists who have faced up to the fact that they do have to accomodate the data coming out of biology labs. In my courses on evolution and population genetics the only definition used for evolution was the change in allele frequencies over time. This seems to be what you are calling micro-evolution.
Two points: first single nucleotide polymorphism are not the only mechanism of genomic change, even in yeast. If you are working with yeast you must know about things like inversions, translocations, polyploidy and the like. There are lots of papers out there that use the synteny of gene clusters to trace the genomic rearrangments that followed the spliting of S. cervisae and S. pombe from their common ancestor. Second, if you have two reproductively isloated groups that are undergoing independent "micro-evolution" the degree of homology between their genomes is going to decrease. If it decreases enough they are going to loose their ability to interbreed because of meiotic failures. To put it baldly, if it is accepted that "micro-evolution" occurs, how could "macro-evolution" not occur given long periods of reproductive isolation?
Made against the guy that had all the women, by the guys that didn't
Except that the guys who were getting all the women were the wealthy and powerful ones, and coincidently they tend to be the ones who write the laws. How did us poor and weak guys convince the wealthy and the powerful to give up their monopoly?
Pretty much every guy I know who's got married (and who isn't rich) had it ruin his life. Oh, sure, they won't admit it. it.
I am sorry your brother finds himself in such a jam, but you are letting it make you as silly in your own way as the songs about "Love makes the world go around". Some marriages fail and make the parties miserable. Some marriages are successful and a source of great consolation. In another posting you said your brother got into this difficulty because he was "lonely and horny". That's the human condition. Marriage doen't cause it, and marriage won't make it go away. Marriage can make it easier to live with.
The best relationship advice I ever saw was in Mallory's "Le Morte De Artur". One of the knights has stumbled into a curse. He must answer the question "What do women want?". If he gets the wrong answer he's killed. If he gets the right answer he has to marry a woman who is a hideous old hag half the day and a young beauty the other half. Someone slips him the right answer which is "Women want what everyone wants: to have their way". On the day of the marriage the hag asks the knight, "so, do you want the beautiful version during the day when everyone can see you with me, or at night when we are alone together in the bedroom?" The knight (bearing in mind the answer to the earlier riddle) answers "Which would you like?". She replies "Clever knight! I shall choose to be the young beauty all 24 hours of the day." Happily ever after and so on...
This doesn't mean you have to yield to your spouse on every question, but you'd better know what they really want, what you really want, and be able to neogtiate honestly when they differ. None of those things is easy.
If the woman tricked him in some way, I don't see why he should be on the list at all
Because he willingly took the risk of relying on the woman's representations. Because he could have taken his own measures to reduce the risk of pregnancy. Because
Any act of coitus between a man and a woman may result in a pregnancy.
As you say this is obvious, and the man knew it when he consented to sex. That puts him on the list.
What audience? Until recently only nobles new how to read. And just because something isn't unheard of doesn't make it a social norm.
Except for the Aeneid, all the works I mentioned were oral traditions: they were recited aloud from memory rather then being read from the page. If history isn't your strong suite you might want to be more humble about drawing sweeping conlusions from it.
Anti-polygamy laws are social structures meant to stablize society. I though my post made it clear they where a good idea. These _aren't_ stratagies! They're social constructs
But there is lots of evidence that for humans social constructs are strategies. I recommend reading Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene".
And My Brother is caring for the child. The woman skipped out
Then good on your brother and shame on the woman. I presume he has sued for support? That may be a dry well, but it isn't different from the problem faced by a lot of mothers trying to get support out of their dead beat dads.
My whole point is we're reasoning creatures
Finally, men are very much slaves to emotion too
Because we are reasoning creatures we are not slaves to emotion. Your brother decided to go with his emotions not his reason, but that was a choice. Slaves don't get to make choices.
Most societies arranged marriges for profit and convience. Love never factored into it. It's only recent that the quaint notion of love had any force beyond poems and books.
You are way overstating your case. Consider the myth of Isis and Osiris, Penelope and Ulysses from Homer's Oddessy, Dido and Aeneas from Virgil's Aeneid, dozens of stories from "The Arabian Nights", and so on. You can dismiss them as just books and poems, but the audience wouldn't have found these stories affecting if they hadn't some relationship to the travails of their own lives. And it isn't just the fiction and mythology. I think if you read the social commentaries of ancient times you'll find they too remark on the conflict between marriage for practical reasons and marriage for love. Economics and politics have usually had the last word in most marriages, but marriage for love was not unknown even in the ancient world.
I guess my point about most wild animals could be argued, but in any case that is certainly how human society operates. Strong, weathly men get desirable mates (and in the absence of anti-Bigamy laws, lots of them). Any King's Harem will prove my point
How do you explain the existence of anti-polygamy laws then? The powerful male with the harem is just one of dozens if not hundreds of reproductive strategies that have evolved across the living world. The fascinating thing about humans is that we employ several of them at once.
But take everything I say with a grain of salt. As someone who has watched his brother methodically destroyed by an unwanted child and a scheming woman
Uh huh. Look, condoms break, diaphrams leak, women lie about being on the pill, men promise to pull out. Any act of coitus between a man and a woman may result in a pregnancy. Someone has to care for his child, I don't see why your brother shouldn't be on top of the list. I'm sorry your brother got involved with a scheming woman, but it was his choice to sleep with her.
Re:If you are so smart...
on
Cube Farm
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· Score: 1
If you want to learn about anything, and you're smart enough to comprehend things without having them spoonfed, you're better off seeing what kind of books rank highest on that topic on amazon, and buying them.
I think you're selling a good university education short. Most of us suffer from the vice of self-deception and can fool ourselves all too easily about how well we've mastered a subject. There nothing like having your work reviewed every week by a skilled critic to keep you honest. There is also the benefit of having accesss to research programs and labratory facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually IBM came to Gates first, hoping they could get MS-BASIC and CPM. At that point Microsoft was selling as many copies of CPM-80 as DRI because of their CPM Soft-Card for the Apple II. However, Microsoft couldn't transfer its CPM license, so Gates sent IBM on to Kildall. Kildall was initially unavailable, so his wife met with the IBM reps. She and the company lawyer were quite reasonably put off by IBM's onerous non-disclosure agreement and decided not to take the risk of signing. Eventually Kildall did meet with IBM but couldn't agree on a deal. See for example Fire in the Valley This doesn't sound terribly unethical to me: Microsoft was simply willing to assume a risk that DRI wasn't.
Only in the same sense that "Linus Torvalds stole the ideas of UNIX and created a free clone of it. Linux was that clone". Are you alleging that Patterson lifted copyrighted code from CPM? Do you have any evidence of that? And of course Dr. Kildall derived many of CPM's features from DEC operating sytems.
Dr. Kildall's death was very sad, and he was a great contributer to the software industry. However, at the time of the IBM deal DRI was a well established company, and IBM did sell CPM-86 for the IBM PC as well as MS-DOS. Dr. Kildall did make quite a bit of money when DRI was sold to Novell. See for example Gary Kildall.
Sure: the mutation that causes sickle cell disease. This is a single base change to a hemeglobin gene. If you get two copies of it you get sickle cell disease. If you get one copy of it you'll be resistant to malaria. There will always be more people who have once copy rather then two copies, so the net effect is beneficial. How about a mutation that increases longevity in mice and worms? These are just a couple of the more spectacular examples from off the top of my head. Consult any text on genetics for more examples.
As an example, two or three times now I've come back to code I'd written years ago, and found some incredibly lame paragraph of code that seemed to do things in a very roundabout way. The structure of the code was clear, so I promptly re-wrote it to be more straightforward and efficient. Things immediately went to hell, and after hours of struggling, I re-discovered what had prompted me to write the lame code in the first place: a bug in an API call. If I had just inlcuded a comment that said (at the least)I could have saved myself several hours. I actually had put comments in the code, but they were the useless sort like: "loop over all instances" or "test for valid pointer".
There is no knowing from the brief news article, but I wonder if they filtered out deaths from diseases that cause wasting? It seems to me that if they included a significant number of deaths from AIDS or cancer it might make it look like being underweight was unhealthy when in fact low weight and death would both be consequences of the underlying disease.
I'm sure DNA therapy will have long term unforseen consequences, but then so did the invention of antibiotics. I don't understand your basis for distinguishing between the two. I suppose you could have a religious belief that mutations are sent by god, but then so is Y. pestis.
How about the entire field of non-supervised machine learning: support vector machines, and training of hidden Markov models? These methods are finding application in everything from spam filtering to speech recognition to genome analysis.
It is an attitude unfortunately typical of a young person trained in physics or math. I'm speaking with a blush here because I remember saying similar things 20 years ago.
My original education was in physics but years later I got a B.S. in chemistry. The physical chemistry classes were relatively easy, though by no means a cinch. Synthetic organic chemistry blew my mind: terrificly hard puzzles that couldn't be framed in terms of math. I've since encountered similar depths in genetics. I still love physics and math, but I no longer accept Rutherford's claim that all science is either physics or stamp collecting.
This whole thread seems to be mistaking assertion for fact.
As far as I can tell from the linked Symatec information the virus turns your computer into a DOS zombie controled over IRS. It doesn't say anything about installing a keystroke logger. The Secret Service investigation is not claiming that the virus was behind the fraudulent transfer. It simply noted the infection as a fact of the investigation.
According to the article Mr. Lopez frequently makes wire transfers (albeit not to Latvia), so I'm not sure why everyone is leaping to the conclusion that this was done by clever cyber criminals and not business associates, customers, or bank employees. It may very well be, but the article contains no evidence to support the claim.
But why is it any more satisfactory to say "Life was created by God, and God exists without being created" then to simply say "Life exists without being created"? Both statements require accepting that some thing could exist without being created, but the first statement introduces an additional entity, namely God. Occam's Razor tells us not to multiply entities needlessly, so what are your grounds for choosing the former over the latter?
Not to beat the point into the ground, but on what logical basis do you choose among the following statments:
"Life exists without being created"
"Life was created by God, and God exists without being created"
"Life was created by the demiurge, the demiurge was created by God, and God exists without being created"
I recommend reading "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/002750.h
1. If the complexity of the natural world is evidence of intelligent design, then isn't the necessary complexity of the designer evidence that the designer was designed? Isn't this an example of the mutlipication of entitities that Occam warned against? I'm not trying to be flip here, this is a sincere question.
2. Have you never heard of genetic algorithims?
3. See http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/ for some recent work in this area.
It just isn't as simple as "scientists good", "lawyers bad". There are saintly lawyers and charlatan scientists. Science is a high risk, high return activity largely paid for by taxation. You assert that we need more scientists but can you marshall arguments that will convinice your fellow citizens to pony up the bucks?
Because similar reports have been issued in the past about impending shortages of scientists and have mostly come to naught except for producing a bunch of Ph.D.'s bitter about their limited job prospects. Take a look at the employment outlook for Ph.D. mathematicians http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos043.htm/.
Much as in pro-sports there is a huge demand for scientists of exceptional talent, but not much demand for those of modest talent.
Don't get me wrong, it is a privilige to study for a Ph.D. in the sciences. Students who love and show talent in a field should be encouraged to consider graduate study. It should never be suggested though that a graduate degree in science is a guarantee of stable employment (as it would be if there were a genuine shortage).
Two points: first single nucleotide polymorphism are not the only mechanism of genomic change, even in yeast. If you are working with yeast you must know about things like inversions, translocations, polyploidy and the like. There are lots of papers out there that use the synteny of gene clusters to trace the genomic rearrangments that followed the spliting of S. cervisae and S. pombe from their common ancestor. Second, if you have two reproductively isloated groups that are undergoing independent "micro-evolution" the degree of homology between their genomes is going to decrease. If it decreases enough they are going to loose their ability to interbreed because of meiotic failures. To put it baldly, if it is accepted that "micro-evolution" occurs, how could "macro-evolution" not occur given long periods of reproductive isolation?
The best relationship advice I ever saw was in Mallory's "Le Morte De Artur". One of the knights has stumbled into a curse. He must answer the question "What do women want?". If he gets the wrong answer he's killed. If he gets the right answer he has to marry a woman who is a hideous old hag half the day and a young beauty the other half. Someone slips him the right answer which is "Women want what everyone wants: to have their way". On the day of the marriage the hag asks the knight, "so, do you want the beautiful version during the day when everyone can see you with me, or at night when we are alone together in the bedroom?" The knight (bearing in mind the answer to the earlier riddle) answers "Which would you like?". She replies "Clever knight! I shall choose to be the young beauty all 24 hours of the day." Happily ever after and so on
This doesn't mean you have to yield to your spouse on every question, but you'd better know what they really want, what you really want, and be able to neogtiate honestly when they differ. None of those things is easy.
But there is lots of evidence that for humans social constructs are strategies. I recommend reading Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene".
Then good on your brother and shame on the woman. I presume he has sued for support? That may be a dry well, but it isn't different from the problem faced by a lot of mothers trying to get support out of their dead beat dads.
Because we are reasoning creatures we are not slaves to emotion.
Your brother decided to go with his emotions not his reason, but that was a choice. Slaves don't get to make choices.
Consider the myth of Isis and Osiris, Penelope and Ulysses from Homer's Oddessy, Dido and Aeneas from Virgil's Aeneid, dozens of stories from "The Arabian Nights", and so on. You can dismiss them as just books and poems, but the audience wouldn't have found these stories affecting if they hadn't some relationship to the travails of their own lives. And it isn't just the fiction and mythology. I think if you read the social commentaries of ancient times you'll find they too remark on the conflict between marriage for practical reasons and marriage for love. Economics and politics have usually had the last word in most marriages, but marriage for love was not unknown even in the ancient world.
How do you explain the existence of anti-polygamy laws then? The powerful male with the harem is just one of dozens if not hundreds of reproductive strategies that have evolved across the living world. The fascinating thing about humans is that we employ several of them at once.
Uh huh. Look, condoms break, diaphrams leak, women lie about being on the pill, men promise to pull out. Any act of coitus between a man and a woman may result in a pregnancy. Someone has to care for his child, I don't see why your brother shouldn't be on top of the list. I'm sorry your brother got involved with a scheming woman, but it was his choice to sleep with her.