No argument there…nor did I ever claim otherwise. You may recall I raised this idea to you myself in the China Virus thread 6 months ago.
A lab leak can describe dangerous manipulation OR a naturally occurring virus slipping out on someone’s shoe. It’s almost a perfectly neutral term in that regard.
Then in all of this you just seem to be strenuously agreeing with me, while imagining that I’m saying something else.
My entire point from the start of this conversation has been that juxtaposing “lab leak” and “natural zoonotic origin” as mutually exclusive alternative hypotheses creates the FALSE implication that “lab leak” —> UNnatural → nefarious or dangerous experimentation. And therefore fosters exactly what you are complaining about:
Would you argue that a scientist walking into a cave and swabbing a bats nose and scooping up it’s feces is “natural”? Would you argue that a scientist bringing together animals that would never encounter each other in the wild into a lab together is “natural”?
All these terms are subjective and we live in a world where most people consume information in 140 character bites. Positioning these two terms against each other is so far down the list of confusing things about this pandemic it doesn’t warrant mention.
Can we focus on the main point here? Yes, there are a range of possible meanings to the word natural, and someone could of course take the view that even collecting samples is “unnatural”.
But the PRINCIPAL sense of natural in this context (and one of the main issues that everyone is concerned with) is whether the key mutation and recombination events that gave rise to the virus took place within animal hosts in the wild, or took place in the Wuhan lab during experimentation.
And, for the umpteenth time - my point here is that the “lab leak” question is orthogonal to this. A lab leak does not necessarily imply a non-natural origin during experimentation.
This sounds like a statement of your opinion of how that term should be used. If it’s based on more than that, would love to hear it. An alternative PRINCIPAL SENSE of natural, and one that seems consistent with the way it’s offset against the “lab leak” hypothesis, would be: it emerged in a way that did not require the presence of the lab. Lab workers gathering the virus via field work and accidently catching/spreading it; bringing it into the lab and studying but not modifying it, and then catching/spreading it; and modifying it in the lab and accidently leaking it are all forms of “lab leak” and not natural origin under that definition.
That’s clearly what you seem to think the debate is about. If you’ve read any of the links in this thread, that’s far too narrow. And artificially narrowing the discussion is the exact bias that led to the original bad reporting.
This is your framing, and as far as I can see, you’re the only one in this thread framing it that way.
I give up. You keep reading what I write and drawing the exact opposite conclusion to what I’m saying.
My point is that this is NOT all that the the debate is about. That there are two orthogonal questions - whether the virus origin is natural or involved lab experimentation; and whether the infection that gave rise to the Wuhan outbreak was a lab leak or via lab workers in the field. And that we should not conflate these two distinct questions.
Conflating these two issues is what led many people to mistakenly dismiss the “lab-leak” theory out of hand.
Where, other than in your posts, are those two questions posed in this thread? All I see is you starting a off topic semantic discussion.
And no, people didn’t originally dismiss the lab leak theory because it was poorly named. People dismissed the lab leak theory because the people most loudly broadcasting it were assholes, documented liars, racists of the highest order and craven political slime.
I was replying to and expanding on @iamthewalrus at post #25, and the question of how and why so many people dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis out of hand for so long.
Now you’re just willfully misrepresenting what I’ve said, since I’ve clarified what I mean numerous times. The issue is not the term “lab leak” per se. It is the presentation of “lab leak” and “natural origin” as alternative hypotheses as though they are mutually exclusive.
I’m done here, this is not productive.
I guess I was hoping you’d address the question as to whether your usage of “natural” in this context is just idiosyncratic to you, or if it was based on something. But if you’re just going to flounce, I’m guess I’ll assume the idiosyncratic hypothesis and continue operating as though “natural origin” and “lab leak” are actually competing hypotheses.
As I’ve said, I was addressing the question of why the “lab leak” hypothesis was wrongly dismissed out of hand by so many people - a fact that has been widely discussed in the press this week.
Here’s the extensive WaPo article on that once again:
That article discusses several instances where the question of a lab leak was conflated with the separate question of whether the origin of the virus was natural (natural in the sense I described - mutation and recombination taking place in animals, not in lab experimentation).
…early efforts to spotlight a lab leak often got mixed up with speculation that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to dismiss the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense.
In response to Cotton speculating about a lab leak, this response in Lancet from a group of scientists, mistakenly conflating the two issues:
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement says. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
Another group of scientists published in Nature, again conflating the two separate questions, dismissing the lab leak idea entirely on the basis that they think the origin is natural:
“Although the evidence shows that SARSCoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD [receptor- binding domain] and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
In all these cases, a natural origin clearly carries the meaning I described. And “lab leak” and “natural origin” are juxtaposed as mutually exclusive alternatives in the mistaken way that I have highlighted.
You can continue to tilt at windmills on this if you want. The folks at Science said:
Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.
I guess we can pin this all on them. Perhaps you can write them a strongly worded memo.
You can call it tilting at windmills, but trying to highlight the conceptual errors that led people dismiss the lab leak theory out of hand for so long seems like something worth discussing. The WaPo just wrote a very extensive article about it, so they seem to think it’s important too.
I agree that naturally evolved as opposed to engineered is a different distinction that the one I mean by “natural vs. lab leak.” What I dispute is that the meaning of natural that you’re using is the only one, or the PRINCIPAL one, or the one that most people mean when they use the term. And I think you’re being overly rigid in your use of that word in this context. But I see where you’re coming from now, so thanks for clarifying.
It’s worth noting that the recent reporting, much of it linked in this thread, criticizes that Nature article that you reference. The data presented there DOES NOT preclude that experimentation created this virus, their conclusions were not supported by the data.
Well that’s another (and worse) issue. But do you get my point? What I’m seeing over and over again in that WaPo timeline and elsewhere is one question being asked, and an orthogonal different question being answered:
Q: What do you think about the lab leak hypothesis?
A: I reject it - there is no evidence that the origin of the virus was through laboratory experimentation or manipulation.
And that’s precisely because “lab leak” and “natural origin” are mistakenly presented as mutually exclusive alternative explanations, when in fact they are separate questions.
Do you really believe that the general skepticism of the lab leak theory was primarily because they combined both the ideas of accidental release of a naturally occurring virus and the genetic experimentation/engineering of a virus into one keyword and not because people like Trump and Cotton spent a year screaming “China Virus” on TV and hinting that the CCP attacked America with this biological WMD?
I mean, lets apply a little common sense here.
I think that contributed, yes. Clearly senior scientists were conflating the separate issues in a confusing manner in their publicly stated positions. And WaPo certainly agrees with me.
Are you suggesting that’s a good reason to decide something is false? Because people you don’t like want it to be true? I mean maybe you’re right, and that’s why some people dismissed it, but that’s just as dumb as believing Trump when he says stuff.
Can you link that? WaPo has multiple articles floating around the last couple days and I don’t recall seeing one where that hypothesis is made.
I’m not even sure what this question is. Assuming the debate we’re having right now is “why did the original reporting and the subsequent public opinion so quickly align against the lab-linked origin?”; then I put the primary, secondary and tertiary causes all at the feet of Trump and the GOP. They made it political from the start, so the facts never had a chance. Semantics had a negligible effect.