Yes, that article covers the views of Michael Worobey and Alina Chan, who are 2 of the 4 debaters in the youtube above. One funny thing about all this is just how few people are involved here. On one side there’s a handful of obsessed conspiracy theorists trying to pore through data, and on the other a handful of equally obsessed apologists, and then possible conspirators?
Anyway, I’d say your article is a -slightly- out of date, since much of the speculation around furin-cleavage sites no longer applies. But yes, I agree people aren’t really changing sides, and probably won’t ever.
It’s also frustrating because the people arguing are so much more qualified than me, that I don’t get to form a meaningful opinion.
In informal terms, the odds of covid-19 is zero, but the number of tries is infinite. It becomes hard to estimate their product without more formal scientific facts to help.
I remember seeing an estimate of the odds of 100 monkeys actually typing a work of shakespeare. As I recall, it was so unlikely that it would never happen in the entire lifetime of the all the stars universe.
Early cells combining to create eukaryote/mitochondria combinations seems just as unlikely to me, but that happened in only a few billion years on earth (but did we get really lucky?)
If something like covid were to happen naturally, this seems like the way it would happen, in china, around a food market. So maybe the odds of it happening over a 50 year period is actually quite high. That is a scary thought.
I’d guess Hamlet was written by Shakespeare, and that previous evolutionary leaps are explained by the weak anthropic principle.
Anyway, I agree it’s weird trying to estimate probabilities after the fact. It makes more sense, to ask what people thought was going to happen before the fact. (Of course, they also disagreed before it happened.)
One thing I note-- you say “50 year period”. But this happened 2 years after the grant proposal to create a covid-like super-virus.
I read an article this past weekend that suggested strongly that current evidence is overwhelmingly from the lab. part of it had to do with frequency of infection around the time it started making headlines. For some reason the amount of infections strongly indicate either natural occurrence or lab leak, though I don’t recall why that is.
I don’t mean a posterior estimation of the probability.
I mean using science to estimate a prior probability.
I think you really need to use science to do this. This is the reason for my examples: intuitively the random monkey example seems impossible just like the evolution of eukaryotic cells, but a more detailed scientific analysis shows this is not the case.
Once you have the prior probability of it naturally occurring, then you also need the prior probability of it being developed in the lab. I don’t know that one either.
Until you have both of those in hand, I don’t think you can meaningfully interpret the kind of observed data you are talking about.
If there were definitive evidence for one source or the other, then this would not be as important. But we don’t have that definitive evidence, so it is critically important.
Taiwan had a Covid lab accident the other day. The researchers were vaccinated and regularly tested and contact traced effectively, so it’s okay. It occurred at BSL-3, with some security protocols being ignored.
Of course the only reason we know about it is that Taiwan was zero Covid, so the infected researcher stuck out like a sore thumb. So who knows how often Covid has leaked from various labs.
Needless to say, it can happen, because here it did happen. I can not fathom how we ever believed it was okay to play games with super viruses.
I always thought Jurassic Park was incredibly stupid, well because it is, but they seen to be right that scientists can’t help themselves and nobody is interested in stopping them either.
Interesting how the conversation around the lab leak has died down. I still think it was from a lab, and I’d like to see that confirmed, but probably best a lid is kept on it. If it was front page news that covid came from a lab in China, I wouldn’t be surprised to see things devolve into the military being involved.
