Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took 4 billion years to get to this point. Plenty of time.
If you read the full review, it's not at all.
But if you add space travel...
Lab Leak 2.0?
191–200 of 319 posts
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#192> “If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.” This sentimental reminds me of a talk given by a government bomb expert where a naive student asked “why do we allow the ingredients for bombs to be sold in store, shouldn’t we ban them all?” The answer of cause is that if we do that, then we suddenly don’t have gasoline, orange juice, basic…
There's an infinite number of possible viruses. Inventing some random new ones doesn't protect anyone.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#193What if it was engineered in the lab to be LESS lethal and severe, so it could finally end COVID 19?
Funny I was about to post the same thought. It's the vaccine for Republicans.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#194Curious why this was flagged?
A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?
And if they are right though? Are you going to apologize for suppressing different theses? As far as I know, Science lives of These and Anti-These, right?
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a cheap shot to me. Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? One quoted thread was from "Tony VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke" Seems like a reasonably valid opinion from someone with a clue. He's addressing specifically why Omicron is weird, and doesn't look like a normal evolution of COVID-19. Another is from "Scott Ferguso…
> Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? Pretty much. Serious people discussing serious things don’t use Twitter as their communication medium.
So Twitter only for the Every Day Joe? This sounds like BS. How many scientists that you probably follow, have announced news around Covid, via Twitter. You've probably even re-tweeted them lol.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that the opposition then is not considering the gravity of this research being responsible for the deaths of millions. Which is obviously absurd, so there is definitely something else going on.
I suspect: 1. You don't know what my position actually is, as I haven't stated it 2. You are confusing assertion and evidence In order to be even remotely convincing, you would have to show that the risk/reward ratio of GoF is stacked against GoF. Right now, you're just aggressively telling us that it is. You'll note that no matter how bad you demonstrate COVID to be, the opposition could (rightly!) claim that there…
Well you still didn't told us whats your position is, but maybe you can answer my question:
HOW GoF helped us to fight Covid? How the process that most likely played a huge role of creating the virus also helped us fighting it? Everyone how defends GoF tells us plebs, it helps us to fight future epidemics, but no one give us an example how it is helping the current one.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#197None of these Substack-based lab-leak hysteria pieces ever address "so what?" I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir, where the author includes "seems to have come from mice" as evidence for the former and not the latter, which is confused. Regardless, there is nothing actionable about any origin theory aside from "be mad at some unnamed scientist" or, as some o…
> I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter?
> The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter?
To the person you're quoting's benefit, there is evidence given, but it doesn't convince them. That's all they are saying.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#198[deleted]
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also does anyone know how many scientists would actually be involved anyway? What is the minimum?
Not that many, probably 1, or maybe 3 to be conservative. Of course there are the institutional and governmental parties as well, but still not that many (1 lab director, maybe 1 executive above them, plus a handful of regulators with detailed knowledge of the labs operations). If it is the case that, say, the WIV leaked the initial virus, there's probably less than a dozen people in the world with positive knowledge…
And they all are going to die in accidents.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#200Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.
You might find the work of David Gelernter (computer scientist) interesting. He's not a creationist, but he has abandoned the theory of evolution. > Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there…
I really regret spending time reading this drivel.