Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

Detecting intelligent design in things is done all the time. Teacup dachshunds are intelligently designed. So's corn and broccoli.

Throwing your hands up and saying "God must've done it!" when you don't have an immediate explanation and can't be bothered to do some research into one is the bad science part.

There could be naturally occurring insertions, but they would generally look similar to an associated coronavirus, or something else local, not 4 discrete changes that are all nearly identical to a (very well studied) virus that should be completely unrelated..

2019-nCov is "The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), informally known as the Wuhan coronavirus."

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_coronavirus_(2019-nCoV)

It would be conspiratorial in nature because it questions the Chinese government's official narrative that the virus emerged from a seafood market, and implies they're covering up the truth.

Of course, people usually use the term "conspiratorial" to be synonymous with "untrue" or even "patently absurd."

> This indicates that these insertions have been preferably acquired by the 2019-nCoV, providing it with additional survival and infectivity advantage. Delving deeper we found that these insertions were similar to HIV-1. Our results highlight an astonishing relation between the gp120 and Gag protein of HIV, with 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein. These proteins are critical for the viruses to identify and latch on to their host cells and for viral assembly (Beniac et al., 2006). Since surface proteins are responsible for host tropism, changes in these proteins imply a change in host specificity of the virus. According to reports from China, there has been a gain of host specificity in case 2019-nCoV as the virus was originally known to infect animals and not humans but after the mutations, it has gained tropism to humans as well.

> Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous. Further, 3D modelling suggests that atleast 3 of the unique inserts which are non-contiguous in the primary protein sequence of the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein converge to constitute the key components of the receptor binding site. Of note, all the 4 inserts have pI values of around 10 that may facilitate virus-host interactions. Taken together, our findings suggest unconventional evolution of 2019-nCoV that warrants further investigation. Our work highlights novel evolutionary aspects of the 2019-nCoV and has implications on the pathogenesis and diagnosis of this virus.

So, maybe, maybe not. What's the likelihood of natural occurences resulting in these inserts ? Are these novel evolutionary aspects natural or engineered ?

Can't outright say "It was made in a lab" but can say "Something's new here".