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A row of asterisks is the most elegant way to explain human reproduction.

"In the novels I had read whenever a lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby.  The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable" (W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale).

As Laurence Sterne put it, "A thousand of my father's most subtle sylogisms could not have said more for celibacy" (Tristram Shandy).