The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#221

Post by zaroth » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

fabbari wrote: post #171

throwaway326429 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab. I am not equipped to assess the biological evid…

There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.

Diamonds coming out of a mine is of course no surprise. But let’s look closer at these “diamonds”.

It’s said that diamonds are like snowflakes as each one’s minute imperfections make it absolutely unique.

So in this case we have a diamond mine pumping out “natural” diamonds but turns out they all have a very specific structure which exactly matches a manual published a few years earlier on making lab created diamonds which are almost indistinguishable from natural ones.

It might lead you to suspect that the diamond mine in fact provides the perfect cover story to ship as many lab-made diamonds as you want and sell them with the natural diamond markup.

I have no way to gauge for myself how definitive these genetic abnormalities are, but if they’ve found published research painting a trail directly toward these specific unique and highly unusual sequences which are also specifically responsible for the extremely contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2, then I think at least we are beyond the simple fallacy of believing “mines make diamonds”.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#222

Post by refurb » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #204

waspleg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, forced organ harvesting, and military occupation of free countries like Hong Kong the benefit of the doubt on biological weapons research gone awry?

Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, an avoidable epidemic of prisoners with COVID-19, and military occupation of free countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or more historically in Iraq (again), Somalia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, I feel like I’m just naming random countries at this point...the benefit of the doubt about anything?

Comments like this really derail an otherwise civil and interesting discussion.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#223

Post by hatsunearu » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

bitcurious wrote: post #168

jmcgough wrote: post #72

The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created. There's a reason we haven't seen a virus like this in a century - because it's so unlikely that a new virus will appear in any given year with both a high rate of transmission and a high fatality rate.

>The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created. I think intelligent design would be a pretty plausible explanation for humanity, if we already knew there was a god.

Intelligent design is kind of stupid because life is clearly not designed very intelligently.

The "evidence" that sars-cov-2 is designed with a guided purpose is kind of there in the paper, though. And that we as a species (and the bois in WIV) clearly had the capacity to do so.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#224

Post by Taniwha » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

calf wrote: post #206

jkhdigital wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinc…

Ah okay it's like the difference between a forensic argument vs a scientific argument.

I think it's more people taking what a court calls 'evidence' and declaring it 'scientific evidence' - sure they both use that same word 'evidence' but they are quite different things and shouldn't be mixed

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#225

Post by chipotle_coyote » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

jkhdigital wrote: post #189

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line of thinking is seductive, believe me, but that's the thing about circumstantial evidence - it is very likely that there is a coronavirus infectivity research station next to a massive source of bat coronaviruses, that was in fact why the lab was there!

But do you see the qualitative difference between "pandemic virus appears in general region where these kinds of viruses are common" and "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab"? You're also just making a straight up false claim anyway, since most of the virus samples discussed in their research come from distant regions (500+ miles away).

Instead of "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab", it might be more accurate to say "pandemic virus has first documented human outbreak in a province whose capital city is a metropolitan area of over 19 million people and also has a viral research lab." Wuhan is bigger than two New York Cities put together -- and it's not at all impossible that the earliest cases actually came from outside the city but were treated in Wuhan. (A report from the South China Morning Post in March, based on unpublished government data, was that "a 55-year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to contract Covid-19," and the description of him as "from Hubei province" rather than "from Wuhan" is at least suggestive.)

If China's BSL-4 virus laboratory was set off in the countryside in a "little" town of 50,000 and the outbreak started there, the paper's argument would be way more compelling. If we could even reliably trace a "patient zero" to a neighborhood near the WIV, then, again, maybe. But we can't. All we can say for sure is that a dangerous global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus started in a huge metro area (or its surrounding province) that's also the site of a BSL-4 lab specifically set up to study dangerous global pandemics caused by novel coronaviruses. The paper's conclusion is, well, pretty much the paper equivalent of archly intoning "that would sure be a weird, ironic coincidence" and staring meaningfully into the camera. I mean, yes, it would be, but that's a little short of a slam dunk.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#226

Post by dboreham » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

mjirv wrote: post #79

Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!! But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0] That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to…

There are virus labs all over the place so this could be a birthday paradox. There's one here in rural Montana (the data we quote often about sars-cov-2 survival times on surfaces was generated there).

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#227

Post by refurb » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:11 AM UTC

anikan_vader wrote: post #198

It is interesting to think about the origins of Covid-19 with Bayesian statistics in mind. We believe that the virus originated in Wuhan, and the two competing "mainstream" theories are whether the virus came from a wet market or a bio lab. I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat i…

That's an interesting argument. I guess one critical piece of data would be - is the probability of Covid-19 originating from wet markets the same across all of China?

If every wet market had the same probability, then yeah, it's odd that the alleged wet market is one of thousands, but just happened to be next to the bio lab in Wuhan.

But if the probability was unevenly distributed and such a virus originating was highly likely in only a few dozen wet markets, Wuhan included, then the probability of it being a coincidence is much higher.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#228

Post by chrisbrandow » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

Has this paper either been peer-reviewed or submitted for peer-review as a preprint?

I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors, scientifically.

I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#229

Post by iskander » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)"

(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#230

Post by iskander » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

etangent wrote: post #2

That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."

It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology.

There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.