this is a fucking terrible article, my gods.
disclaimer: i am, as usual, neutral on the source of this virus (tho i maintain animal market as more likely than lab).
but it was *not* created using "accelerated evolution", GoF techniques or anything like that.
disclaimer: i am, as usual, neutral on the source of this virus (tho i maintain animal market as more likely than lab).
but it was *not* created using "accelerated evolution", GoF techniques or anything like that.
https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/1445736179631116288
there's also nothing special about it being able to infect human cells at emergence... IT KIND OF HAS TO DO THAT IN ORDER TO EMERGE AT ALL, LET ALONE BE A PANDEMIC THREAT.
not to mention it's not unique... SARS Classic, WIV1, the recent Laos bat sarbecoviruses... all of these can infect human cells.
an "unbiased jury" would not claim it was created in a lab, b/c the scientific evidence plainly does not support that.
an "unbiased jury" would not claim it was created in a lab, b/c the scientific evidence plainly does not support that.
btw, claiming it was human-adapted at emergence is patent nonsense considering we got multiple progressively more human-adapted variants (B.1.1.7/Alpha, B.1.617.2/Delta) doing selective sweeps b/c they transmit better.
but more fundamentally...
but more fundamentally...
...a virus w/*any* amount of pre-emergent human adaptation, passaging in humanized mice, etc, would have D614G at emergence.
it's a stabilizing mutation that in humans seems to be near-purely advantageous, is key to enabling later FCS improvements & has been picked up...
it's a stabilizing mutation that in humans seems to be near-purely advantageous, is key to enabling later FCS improvements & has been picked up...
...in nearly every lineage, most prominently in B.1, of which nearly every virus in circulation nowadays descends from.
not having D614G at emergence when it got picked up & selected for near-instantly? yeah it was not human-adapted at emergence, just good enough.
not having D614G at emergence when it got picked up & selected for near-instantly? yeah it was not human-adapted at emergence, just good enough.
as for the FCS, here's my thread on why this one does not bear any characteristics of engineering, just recombination:
& here's Bill Gallagher's excellent thread on how that recombination likely happened: virological.org/t/tackling-rum…
https://twitter.com/wanderer_jasnah/status/1394247714024660994
& here's Bill Gallagher's excellent thread on how that recombination likely happened: virological.org/t/tackling-rum…
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