Yes, science's incentives encourage novelty. That's actually part of the problem. It's how we got climate change denialism funded by Exxon, decades of bunk nutr

Yes, science's incentives encourage novelty. That's actually part of the problem. It's how we got climate change denialism funded by Exxon, decades of bunk nutritional advice funded by competing food companies, Koreans faking human cloning, and Andrew Wakefield falsifying evidence of vaccines causing autism by giving small children colonoscopies. The problem is that science is actually not that great at sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Better than chance, and better than science denialism, but not anywhere close to perfect. Many of the participants in the scientific process are malicious and they have sybils to obscure their identity and ballot-stuff meta-analyses. And scientists are not always willing to call out malicious evidence right away, because this is a community that runs on trust and understanding. So if anything, we have too many fake dissidents perfectly willing to make the entire scientific community chase their own tails. Furthermore, the entire scientific establishment has an incentive to refute COVID-19 explanations that imply their research is socially harmful[0]. If COVID-19 is a lab leak then the explanation is simple and the preventative fix is a permanent ban on certain kinds of virology research. Nobody in the scientific community wants a repeat of George Bush's stem cell research ban. But, if COVID-19 came from wet markets, then there's loads of research you can do there. You can sample viruses from sick animals to find precursor mutations for the original COVID-19 strain. You can hypothesize about mutation rates and evolutionary pressures. Wet markets are novel. Lab leaks are boring - and a threat. And as always, more research is needed. [0] I don't quite buy the idea that some have that China is deliberately trying to cover up the lab leak hypothesis because it makes China look bad. China looks bad regardless of where the virus came from. If it came from the wet markets, then China needs to shut them down. If it came from the WIV, then China needs to ban gain-of-function research. Either way it's China's fault.