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It is worth clarifying that she was not responding to this paper specifically, just to general arguments of the type “this must be man made because it has so ma

• dahfizz 6y ago
  > However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission. You are letting language get in the way here. Researchers at Wuhan weren't studying "features" of viruses, they were studying what happens exactly when you insert X amino acid at Y location and how that can affect the structure of Z protein. And that exact, one in a billion, never before seen mutation happens to occur randomly right next door to them?
  • anoncareer0212 6y ago
    The line of thinking is seductive, believe me, but that's the thing about circumstantial evidence - it is very likely that there is a coronavirus infectivity research station next to a massive source of bat coronaviruses, that was in fact why the lab was there!
    • jkhdigital 6y ago
      But do you see the qualitative difference between "pandemic virus appears in general region where these kinds of viruses are common" and "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab"? You're also just making a straight up false claim anyway, since most of the virus samples discussed in their research come from distant regions (500+ miles away).
      • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        Instead of "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab", it might be more accurate to say "pandemic virus has first documented human outbreak in a province whose capital city is a metropolitan area of over 19 million people and also has a viral research lab." Wuhan is bigger than two New York Cities put together -- and it's not at all impossible that the earliest cases actually came from outside the city but were treated in Wuhan. (A report from the South China Morning Post in March, based on unpublished government data, was that "a 55-year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to contract Covid-19," and the description of him as "from Hubei province" rather than "from Wuhan" is at least suggestive.) If China's BSL-4 virus laboratory was set off in the countryside in a "little" town of 50,000 and the outbreak started there, the paper's argument would be way more compelling. If we could even reliably trace a "patient zero" to a neighborhood near the WIV, then, again, maybe. But we can't. All we can say for sure is that a dangerous global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus started in a huge metro area (or its surrounding province) that's also the site of a BSL-4 lab specifically set up to study dangerous global pandemics caused by novel coronaviruses. The paper's conclusion is, well, pretty much the paper equivalent of archly intoning "that would sure be a weird, ironic coincidence" and staring meaningfully into the camera. I mean, yes, it would be, but that's a little short of a slam dunk.
      • wokwokwok 6y ago
        It's a tough call. If you read the actual paper, what they say is: "These meet the criteria of means, timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse the burden of proof. Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive" ie. Basically, there are enough red-flags here that the burden-of-proof is to show that it isn't artificial rather than that it is. ...and you could hear that argument. On the other hand, it's not really rigorous. You can't go and say, hey, look, I invented an EM drive; rather than proving that it generates thrust without any emissions by isolating it and measuring it, the burden of proof is on everyone else to "prove why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive". Ie. Before you go and measure anything, first you have to come tell us why we're wrong. Now, rather than putting the EM drive in an isolated box and measuring the thrust it produces, you have 50 different people who have to go out and prove that EM drives are impossible before anyone actually goes and measures anything. See any problems here? I mean, you could argue it either way, but it doesn't convince me. While I agree that the paper lays out some interesting points, they're wide open to attack on the conclusion they draw from them. This, in particular: "We refute pre-emptively objection that this methodology does not result in absolute proof by observing that to make such a statement is to misunderstand scientific logic. The longer the chain of causation of individual findings that is shown, especially converging from different disciplines, the greater the confidence in the whole." Sure. "We posit that the evidence below attains a high level of confidence." Yup, that's what they've done here. They posit which means, in this case, arbitrarily assert without proof that it is the case that there is a high level of confidence here. They just haven't shown that in a compelling way imo.
  • kingkawn 6y ago
    Yes, probability at work in nature is capable of such a thing, as improbable as we may find it. Also there are probably trillions upon trillions of copies of the virus by now, one in a billion isnt hard to imagine.