Angus Dalgleish: A substantial amount of GOF research has been undertaken on the SARS-Coronaviruses but four studies are especially noteworthy. They are linked in two ways. Scientifically, in that the third and fourth build upon the results of the first and second; and in the continuity of the institution and personnel involved: The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a key collaborator in these projects and Dr Zheng-Li Shi, one of the most senior and experienced of the Institute’s virologists and bat specialists, appears in some capacity in all of them.
In 2010 scientists from the ‘Special Viruses’ section of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were engaged in Gain of Function experiments, jointly with international collaborators, to increase coronaviruses infectiousness for humans. What they did was, to put it simply, to play about with bat and human ACE2 receptors in order to better train some SARS-like coronaviruses to efficaciously infect the latter, us humans that is.

In 2015 scientists from the same ‘Special Viruses’ section of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were still engaged in Gain of Function work with a team from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Together, they manipulated bat viruses to create a chimera, that is, an artificial man-made virus, called SHC014-MA15 which binds to and can proliferate on human upper airway cells.

Report by the COVID Crisis Group published in April 2023. They are agnostic on the origins but highlight some of the limitations of Worobey et. al. Authors include David Relman, James Le Duc, Marc Lipsitch, Michael Callahan, David Heymann, James Lawler & Michael Osterholm. The report suggests "there is not enough evidence available from inside of China to come down hard on any theory of the origins of the virus.

@shallit43 @ianbirrell @mattwridley @BBCr4today All the points in the chart above have been addressed as far as I can tell.

1) David Relman described the early case data as "hopelessly impoverished". Missing earlier cases and ascertainment bias as discussed by @DavidBahry. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mb… @shallit43 @ianbirrell @mattwridley @BBCr4today @DavidBahry 2) The genome shows no sign of engineering or manipulation? Not what has been said privately. Garry hasn't even answered his own question! In any case, the features of the virus are consistent with serial passage and/or inserted FCS.

How journals can close ranks. Bill Hamilton, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, wrote to Science & Nature on the theory AIDS originated from live polio vaccines prepared in chimpanzee tissue cultures. Rejected by both, perhaps using the same reviewer. This theory apparently goes back to someone called Louis Pascal, who found polio vaccines had been routinely grown in primate kidney cells and these had been tested on volunteers in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950's. The oldest confirmed HIV case was in 1959 in the Congo.

Robert Winston: for many years, sexual jealous was thought not to be a universal human instinct, rather a product of our own Western sexual repression, hang-ups and neuroses. 🧵 Mead seemed to be saying that we do not need to be the way that we are. It is only our Western way of life that blemishes the 'tabula rasa', the blank slate with which we are all born, leading to violence, moral disintegration and sexual confusion.

Documentary about the firestorm of controversy in anthropology caused by Derek Freeman's 1983 book 'The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead'. Mead had become famous for her portrayal of 1920's Samoa as an idyllic place where of free love flourished.
Mead had gone to Samoa at the suggestion of her supervisor Franz Boas. It seems she was running short of time and the adolescent girls she asked apparently pranked her. The book Coming of Age in Samoa was a hit. It was seen to support views of cultural determinism.

The codon used in SARS-CoV-2, CGG, is the least common of the six, representing just 1.5% of the total Arg codons. They inserted two of them, back to back. This is not surprising because CGG is the codon widely used in labs for Arg for over a decade.
americanthinker.com/articles/2023/… Dr. Steven Quay testified that “the WIV has acknowledged that for several years they’ve worked with humanized mice developed in Dr. Ralph Baric’s laboratory.” 

Humanized mice are the perfect vehicle for researchers to develop viruses optimized for human infectivity.

[S]cientists that rely on Fauci for their research funding, fearful of sanctions being placed on their life’s work, rallied around the “anti-lab leak” stance...Science, whose political bias has become very apparent, attempted to provide legitimacy... zerohedge.com/covid-19/every… The “market origin hypothesis” is based on four debatable premises... This is why reviewers forced the authors to remove the phrase “dispositive evidence” as a requirement for publication.

@Ana___fox @R_H_Ebright @DouthatNYT SAGO & WHO don't find these papers persuasive. They recently confirmed all hypotheses remain on the table. Fundamentally, they rely on fragmentary and biased data (market link requirement for many early cases) and miss early cases as @DavidBahry sets out.
zenodo.org/record/7016143… @Ana___fox @R_H_Ebright @DouthatNYT @DavidBahry Recall Wuhan Institute of Virology had successful hACE2 binding and humanized mouse infection with synthetic recombinant bat coronaviruses. Unlike SARS1 and other zoonotic viruses SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan already optimized for human ACE2 cells. nature.com/articles/s4159…

Legendary computational biologist  Nick Patterson: "I thought the lab leak was possible but far from proved. However the leak of the DARPA grant proposal changed my view. I now think that by far the most likely cause of the pandemic was an accidental leak of an engineered virus." "There has been a lot of special pleading arguing against an artificial origin of COVID-19."

Susan Weiss: how can that site have appeared at the S1/S2 border- I hate to think it was engineered...

Shan-Lu Liu: I completely agree with you, but rumor says that furin site may be engineered. Shan-Lu Liu: "[R]umor says that furin site may be engineered. Importantly, the virus RNA sequence around the furin site (288 nt), before and after, has 6.6% differences, but with no amino acid changes at all."

Account of life in Haiti from a US doctor:

staff...don't understand sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable. ...ones who can afford to go to school, your first problem is that the schools can't afford paper: one of our hosts told stories of high schoolers who were at the level of Western 5th graders because they kept forgetting everything: they couldn't afford the paper to take notes on

Debate in India over bill to curb population growth in Uttar Pradesh its most populous state:

"It proposes denying government jobs, promotions, subsidies and the right to contest local elections to anyone who has more than two children"

bbc.com/news/world-asi… Since the early 1990's, 12 states have introduced some version of a two child policy.

Ralph Holloway, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, on brain size controversies: "Simply put, this research area remains an intensely political and near-suicidal enterprise." abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/bra… "Jon Marks claimed he "outed" me as a "racist" because I had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen against Loring Brace's assertion that Jensen was a bigot...I remain appalled at our discipline which regards him as such & invented the appellation Jensenism to tar and feather him."

*Thread*
Brookings on race gaps in standardized tests from 2015. The mean score on the math section of the SAT for all test-takers was 511 out of 800, the average scores for blacks (428) and Latinos (457) are significantly below those of whites (534) and Asians (598). Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. Of those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black.

#HowToArgueWithARacist doesn't address Harvard geneticist David Reich or MIT's Robert Weinberg? Traits influenced by genetics, including cognitive & behavioural traits, are expected to differ somewhat across groups as allele frequencies differ. nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opi… The section in the @guardian asked why black athletes don't dominate swimming. Aside from the obvious point that swimming has higher barriers to entry than sprinting, there are average biomechanical differences Rutherford omits to mention. pratt.duke.edu/about/news/spe…

*THREAD:*
NYU Philosophy Professor James Burnham went from advisor to Trotsky to the CIA to anti-communist and founding editor of NR. His anti anti-McCarthyism ultimately lead to him cancelled on the Left. The CIA was anti-McCarthyist. "Those wretched little people" one CIA officer is said to have called McCarthy Committee staffers, scorning them on political and social grounds.

With the #IStandWithMaya matter it's worth revisiting this Colin Wright article on recent efforts to deconstruct biological sex We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.

Lee & DeVore's famous Man the Hunter is often summarized as showing that most calories come from gathering, not hunting, that most gathering is done by females, and that hunter-gatherers need spend only a relatively small part of their time in gathering. Taken together, these facts imply that a woman can feed her family with little male assistance. This suggests that males would leave more descendants by focusing their efforts on mating rather than on provisioning.*(2)
penta3.ufrgs.br/educacao/teori…