By the same logic, was the H1N1 spanish flu designed to perfectly flourish and kill possibly 10% of hosts?
You say it in your second paragraph. You're no biologist. But you find it strange. Very few biologists find it strange. They have in fact been warning of a ticking time bomb [0 for brevity, 1 for article].
May I respectfully suggest that you stick to your lane regarding the science? WHO ups and downs and political bickering to one side, science is a messy process of honing in on the right answer and lay-people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that when other answers fitting in more closely with their world view abound. It would be nice if scientists could come out on day 1 and tell everyone exactly what to expect but that isn't how science works.
I understand your impetus to tell others to 'stick to your lane' but I respectfully disagree and cite their post and your response as why. OP had what you deem a misapprehension and they deem a valid point. By voicing their point as they believes it, you were able to retort with evidence you feel should convincingly disprove it. To me, this is reasoned, diverse discourse correcting for unintuitive misapprehensions, at the very least. Is this not a medium like HackerNews is for?
HN has always felt like a good/safe place (to me) to talk about interesting things with a mix of experts and lay people.
When it gets down to science though, agree or disagree need to be left to the experts. I can’t be the expert/final arbiter because my knowledge isn’t good enough (although I have some capacity), and so I am encouraging OP to go with the experts on this one.
It’s too complex a field for people to have their own opinions based on hearsays - science should not be politics and we’re seeing that in the world now. It doesn’t matter what you believe coming in with science, you have to be guided by (a best approximation of the evolving) facts.
I’m not totally sure what you disagree on, is it the rudeness of ‘stay in your lane’ or my argument?
Ben Franklin once said that the best argument against democracy was a discussion with the average voter. But I think there is an equal risk there of members of a society being unwilling to read what experts put out, and evaluate it themselves as well. Once people start saying I don't know anything about this and I can't make any determinations, democracy starts to make a lot less sense. At the end of the day science is basically critical reasoning backed by fact collection. If you can go read up on the facts, you can reason based on them. If someone can explain to you why you are wrong that may be one thing, but simply assuming you can never reason anything out is very dangerous.
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but I'd like to point out that there's no evidence Ben Franklin said that. That quote is commonly misattributed to Churchill, but that seems to also be a misattribution [1].
Okay, sorry, threshold triggered. I've called this attitude and tendency toward academic elitism out before, and I'll do it again.
We don't rely on experts to tell us what we know or have the capacity of knowing. The hard to access ideas have already been articulated and written down in this case. OP is absolutely right to be misapprehensive in light of these studies and the perception of "it doesn't compute". By virtue of surviving to human adulthood, and to even be here admitting there may be the makings of ignorance in themselves, they've already proven they have a higher than average meta-awareness of their own capabilities, which means they have a similar basis from which to evaluate other people's action.
What they've seen from the experts in the field is a growing rift, and far from a universal consensus. They've seen an abnormally ineffectual and particularly inexplicable reaction from official sources. As a non-expert, if they weren't consumed with misapprehension, they'd be a fool.
All "official" means of rebuttal to disprove lab origin are stymied by refusal to submit to inspection by the rest of the world by the origin nation in question, and we have evidence of official orders to obfuscate any evidence trail that may have existed in the early stages of the pandemic.
You can dismiss the motivation for why (saving face/survival), but no reasonable non-expert with even a passing interest and the capability or inclination to follow the threads laid bare in those papers should shy away from trying to reason from it. The hard part that requires an expert is done. The paper is written. The known has been hewn from the unknown. The question people should be cogitating on is as follows:
"Given what I know my species is capable of, and the circumstantial proximity of all the physically mandated ingredients for this to even be a possibility, is it unreasonable that this crisis could have an origin from the one place on earth staffed, equipped, educated, and mandated by it's reason for existence to engage in the academic pursuit of the processes that could lead to a virus such as this?"
You do not need to be an expert to consume or evaluate the output of experts. We rely on experts to handle that which no human has handled before, or to quickly handle that which few have handled before, and we are not willing to walk the path to know. This is not that. Further, if everyone left it to the experts, there would be no experts. "Stay in your lane" has no business being aired in any context in which one or the other is in the process of endeavoring to further their own understanding. If a human being has done it, a human being can do it, and not one person on Earth has the standing to tell another not to reason to the best of their ability, or through communication with peers seek to surpass their previous limitations in that department. Science has not, and never should be, only the Ph.D holders need apply. Especially when the questions being asked are far away from technical minutiae, and closer to "Given everything that would be needed to make it happen was there, should we consider lab origin as worthy of delving into?"
Given material I covered earlier in the thread (on the ill-advised endeavor of blindly deferring to the fox on matters relating to the security of the hen house), the answer should strike expert and non-expert alike as worth looking into. The expert can be forgiven for not deeming it worth it, at least, as they have much more pressing issues to attend to in trying to stop/prevent the next thing. The non-expert on the other hand should be seriously weighing how much we trust our neighbors when they say "Nope. Nothing to see here. Why are you looking anyway? How dare you! Questioning our handling of internal matters!"
Tell someone they're wrong when they have facts wrong, or don't have all of them, guiding them in the right direction, but don't dare tell a person to cease in their attempts to enlighten themselves and reason from what is in front of them. Especially on a forum where the entire point is to share knowledge with the very experts who should putatively be being deferred to.
Stay in your lane. The nerve. The unabashed gall. Here, of all places.
As I understand it, the general rule of nature is that biological specimens don't thrive as well in environments that they are not evolutionary adapted to. This is why humans can't swim very fast and fish can't walk on land.
The fact is that COVID-19 made its first jump to humans (new environment) only a few months ago and yet it spreads better than most pre-existing known coronaviruses that have been affecting humans for centuries before that seems odd.
So when scientific papers match my layman intuition (though I do know something about evolution in general, just not microbiology) and I also see the so-called 'real experts' lying about the facts, and some other experts are writing papers which seem to confirm with my intuition, then my intuition has a lot more weight.
The H1N1 flu spread during the first world war that humanity has ever had. It came in waves and each wave was evolved. Talk about extremely unique circumstances to brew the perfect storm.
When COVID-19 spread, there was literally nothing different occuring at the time that could have provoked any evolutionary changes in any virus to be more evolved in infecting humans outside of normal human density levels.
Flu viruses have been evolving in humans for millenia. This has not.
> there was literally nothing different occuring at the time that could have provoked any evolutionary changes in any virus to be more evolved in infecting humans outside of normal human density levels.
There is now, though. We're selecting strains that aren't as concerned with masks and social distancing. Back in March, I remember reading some anecdotal accounts of cities' responses to H1N1, but it wasn't widespread. We've never actually stopped somethings this widespread, so it's not clear how these measures play out long-term.
To expand on your first point, the circumstances of World War 1 led to carriers of the asymptomatic strains of H1N1 staying in place, in trenches, where the strains extinguished themselves for lack of hosts to spread to.
Carriers of the more symptomatic strains were transported to military hospitals which acted as conduits of transmission.
The result was the virus progressively evolving to become more deadly.
The first wave of the Spanish flu had a fatality rate that is typical of the flu, with deaths preponderantly amongst the elderly, which again is typical.
The second wave was massively more deadly, and killed the young in large numbers.
Is Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier not science worthy enough to give credit or what is your point? Or is science a democratic forum where the most votes win and not facts? If it's not facts but guesstimates then everybody has equal input into that, some intuitively more so.
You're probably not french nor in a quack-watch group (anti-guru groups essentially).
Luc montagnier made a lot of money writing about how homeopathy works thanks to water memory, i'd say i would disqualify every work he's done since then if it is not peer-reviewd.
But in a way this further proves my point. How can one be expected to "stick to one's lane" when you have to check on each and every "expert" out there. It is quite valid to think by oneself!
It's surprising to me the GP looked at what a Nobel laureate said with trust and was still told to "stick to one's lane".
And if science facts need to be "voted on" by a majority of scientists then it stops being a fact and more like an informed guess. But that doesn't necessarily mean a layman could not reach the same or a better conclusion.
When things are so clearly bullshit then the point of being 'open minded' about things that are done and dusted only serves to confuse and obfuscate. Take the US at the moment. A contry ripped apart by anti-scientific thinking.
To be more specific, the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are still potentially unknown but if the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it has natural origin. So what does the purpose of dissenting voices, and the average joe seizing on one of these because 'it feels right'? It's the same problem that has lead to anti-vaccers - the unneecessary sewing of doubt where it is not their place to doubt.
Stay open minded, ask important questions, but for gods sake, if you are not a scientist, recognise that those that are trained people who are doing much of the hard work for you. And scientific concensus is not going to be overturned by someone listening to the president on fox news or one outlier quack peddler
You say it in your second paragraph. You're no biologist. But you find it strange. Very few biologists find it strange. They have in fact been warning of a ticking time bomb [0 for brevity, 1 for article].
May I respectfully suggest that you stick to your lane regarding the science? WHO ups and downs and political bickering to one side, science is a messy process of honing in on the right answer and lay-people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that when other answers fitting in more closely with their world view abound. It would be nice if scientists could come out on day 1 and tell everyone exactly what to expect but that isn't how science works.
[0] https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warned-that-china-was-a-... [1] https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf