As far as the example goes, whatever significance one's parentage may have later in the book, I don't see how it would be served to have pages devoted to the sperm swimming up the fallopean tubes and the protein changes in the ovum as it journeys toward the uterus.

I know a modest amount about programming languages, though I'm far from a professional programmer. I'm also not so enamored of programming that I will read in rapt awe someone's description of such in a fiction novel. As for what I think the author intended to convey, the impression I got was that he was so pleased at having thought out the process, that he just HAD to share it with everybody, no matter how much of a waste of space it was. That and he probably was being paid by the word.

IMO, the author conveyed a huge deal of extraneous information, in an exceedingly lengthy and boring manner, and that had little to do with anything important later on. Then again, maybe a hundred or so pages after I quit it would have become key information; the point is, by that point I was so bored with the book that I tossed it away and haven't picked it up since.

Life is short, and I have a lot of things to do; it's OK by my standards to simply tell something if it will actually get the story moving.