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Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end. There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in nat

Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end. There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a lab (leaked or engineered). Maybe it was a lab leak, but there is not stronger evidence for that, than for the zoonotic event. Here is your bad science: - H0: The origin is the lab. - H1: The origin is a naturally ocurring zoonosis. As evidence for H1 cannot convince you, you accept H0 without any proof. Great science! Problem is your H0 is wrong. H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence (you call it circumstancial, as this was a trial) like similar sequences found in bats nearby. You must get better evidence to prove the unusual lab leak hypothesis. Your H0 and H1 are reversed.

tripletao 2y ago
You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say. > There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote: > Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 The WIV had the biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world.
timr 2y ago
Well, I cited a canonical paper making the argument you're advancing, so if it's not that, then... As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out. > H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...

tripletao 2y ago

You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say. > There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote: > Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117 The WIV had the biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world.

timr 2y ago

Well, I cited a canonical paper making the argument you're advancing, so if it's not that, then... As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out. > H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...