It could just as easily be argued that Rees's risk assessment doesn't fit Pinker's worldview (successfully contarian as it might be in many cases), and thus, Pinker is irrationally biased here. Rees won the bet.
Lord Rees does not seem to believe that the pandemic meets his criteria for "bio error or bio terror."Rees won the bet.
Natural pandemics are a constant threat, but is it just scaremongering to raise concerns about human-induced risks from bio error or bio terror? Sadly, I don’t think so. We know all too well that technical expertise doesn’t guarantee balanced rationality. The global village will have its village idiots and they’ll have global range. The spread of an artificially released pathogen can’t be predicted or controlled. And that’s a nightmare. Whereas an atomic bomb can’t be built without being conspicuous or easily monitored, bio and cyber activities can. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals) by bio as well as cybertechnology will pose a big challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy and security.
I think it's quite generous to describe the Rees side as a risk assessment. It's not even 100 words, 3% of which don't pass spell-check and one is an ill-defined coining that does not exclude asteroid strike. It mentions only two numbers, "thousands-even millions" of people, that's four [edit: 3] orders of magnitude of WAG. Neither of the two risk factors he assessed, organized terrorist groups and individual bio-hackers, were behind the pandemic. Rees argues with four sentences: one is an unsupported and non-measurable assertion, one is a novel definition, and two refer to his state of mind! If providing evidence for one's beliefs is a sign of irrational bias, well, I guess that explains a lot.
Covid19 might be due to an accidental lab leak, which seems to qualify here. I'm not saying that Rees has eloquently made a case here on his longbet. I'm saying that he won the bet, and he might be more correct in his thinking than Pinker. Your hypotheses don't have to be well-founded to be correct; the converse is true as well. Thus far, the experimental evidence suggests Rees is correct. Pinker had evidence for his hypothesis, but it led him to wager incorrectly. Of course, it's an n of 1, so we haven't disproved either.By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent.
If providing evidence for one's beliefs is a sign of irrational bias, well, I guess that explains a lot.
Much higher. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/ That's from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2008. There are many more crumbs on that path.However, the ACE2-binding activity of SL-CoVs was easily acquired by the replacement of a relatively small sequence segment of the S protein from the SARS-CoV S sequence, highlighting the potential dangers posed by this diverse group of viruses in bats. It is now well documented that bat species, including horseshoe bats, can be infected by different CoVs. Coinfection by different CoVs in an individual bat has also been observed (26, 29, 39). Knowing the capability of different CoVs to recombine both in the laboratory (2, 14, 15, 32) and in nature (22, 41, 44), the possibility that SL-CoVs may gain the ability to infect human cells by acquiring S sequences competent for binding to ACE2 or other surface proteins of human cells can be readily envisaged.
My guess would have been 5% or less, but I don't know anything about it other than from a few rumors so I am not very confident. We have seen plenty of previous pandemics that presumably did not require any human intervention to get started, but now thousands—even millions—of people have access to biotech tools and information. The Washington Post says it's doubtful that the virus came from a lab, but the evidence provided suggests that we don't know where it originated. The expressed concern about terrorists and weirdos made me exclude well-intentioned researchers who accidentally release a virus, but that's just what Rees meant by "bioerror." Pinker seems to have accepted this bet without a definition of that term.
The early samples have reportedly been destroyed. It would be trivial to determine if the virus originated from the lab if the effort was made. Shi was doing gain-of-function experiments with SARS-Cov in a lab without sufficient safeguards, and epidemiological data shows it did not originate at the wet market, but nearby. I don't think it is fully appreciated what types of experiments Shi and others were conducting. They were taking coronaviruses, and making them infect human cells efficiently, both by driving random mutations, and by engineering them to do so.In March, Shi told the Scientific American that in the early days of the outbreak, even she wondered whether coronaviruses were to blame. “Could they have come from our lab?” After all, her lab had collected and sequenced tens of thousands of coronaviruses over the past decade. (She has since adamantly denied that the new coronavirus could have emerged from her lab. Her boss and the WIV issued similar denials.)
The Scientific American article is pretty amazing. The description of Shitou Cave is just as creepy as Kitum Cave was in The Hot Zone. "Editor’s Note (4/24/20): This article was originally published online on March 11. It has been updated for inclusion in the June 2020 issue of Scientific American and to address rumors that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab in China." There are many differences between the March 11 article and the current version, mostly editorial.
Interesting. After:The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326 published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says.
Since then, researchers have published more than 4,500 genomic sequences of the virus, showing that samples around the world appear to “share a common ancestor,” Baric says.