4 ms·

The third tweet in the thread you linked[1] demonstrates why it would have been a bad idea to treat those initial findings as a "major red flag". [1]: https://

• padobson 5y ago
  The third tweet demonstrates nothing. The linked Nature paper in the third tweet [0] may demonstrate why a reservoir animal is more likely than the virus being artificially engineered, but damned if I can understand the reasoning in it. Maybe someone with a biology background or just plain smarter than me can explain it better. In any case, my original point still stands, without exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or the discovery of a reservoir animal, the lab leak theory should not be dismissed and any attempt to do so is just politics. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
  • rolph 5y ago
    one of the simplest forms of engineering a virus is called; serial passageing with artificial selection this means passing the pathogen from one individual to others then selecting based on desired character to inocculate the next cohort of hosts; this will amplify the frequency of the desired character. this process will also occur naturally, accompanied by natural selection. this produces a genome that is devoid of the base pair level artefacts that can be observed when molecular genetic tools are used to edit and splice a genome. molecular editing produces sequence artefacts its like leaving a bit of your scissors behind when you cut a string. this is easy to spot; a smoking gun. artifically directed selection is not easy to spot but would be evident in the case that frequencies of characters or traits are not distributed according to the laws of transmission genetics