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We've already found another previously unknown naturally occurring bat coronavirus which is less dissimilar to SARS-COV-2 than RATG13 and better suited to bindi

We've already found another previously unknown naturally occurring bat coronavirus which is less dissimilar to SARS-COV-2 than RATG13 and better suited to binding to human ACE2 receptors. The most logical conclusion isn't "RATG13 is very far away from SARS-COV-2 so the lab must have done a lot of work to it", it's "wherever SARS-COV-2 came from, it wasnt RATG13 in the last five years". The reason why the "lab origin" argument gets sneered at so often even though there's nothing remotely implausible about the basic "lab leaks happen" bit isn't just the politics of it, but also the insistence of some of its most passionate proponents for chasing red herrings.

lamontcg 5y ago
"so the lab must have done a lot of work to it" That's sort of the core misconception right there. People don't understand that what we do in labs is pretty much just small scale incredibly shitty hacks that use exactly what nature does, but we can't possible scale it up. When labs do "serial passage" experiments that is just emulating nature and evolution and natural selection. We're changing the fitness function the virus needs to live within and then passing it through a dozen or so animals and seeing mutation and selection at work in the output. We can't do that on the scale of million or billions of animals in a lab. Serial passage through a million animals, however, is just another Wednesday afternoon to natural evolution. The white tailed deer in the United States are now a huge bioreactor doing a serial passage gain of function experiment to produce deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2. It is possible that Omicron came from a similar natural experiment in rodents. All our factory farmed animals are just large bioreactors for serial passage / gain of function experiments with millions of animals. No lab can ever scale up to those levels.

lamontcg 5y ago

"so the lab must have done a lot of work to it" That's sort of the core misconception right there. People don't understand that what we do in labs is pretty much just small scale incredibly shitty hacks that use exactly what nature does, but we can't possible scale it up. When labs do "serial passage" experiments that is just emulating nature and evolution and natural selection. We're changing the fitness function the virus needs to live within and then passing it through a dozen or so animals and seeing mutation and selection at work in the output. We can't do that on the scale of million or billions of animals in a lab. Serial passage through a million animals, however, is just another Wednesday afternoon to natural evolution. The white tailed deer in the United States are now a huge bioreactor doing a serial passage gain of function experiment to produce deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2. It is possible that Omicron came from a similar natural experiment in rodents. All our factory farmed animals are just large bioreactors for serial passage / gain of function experiments with millions of animals. No lab can ever scale up to those levels.