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“ Does the virus have features that suggest it was created in a lab? Several researchers have looked into whether features of SARS-CoV-2 signal that it was bioengineered. One of the first teams to do so, led by Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, determined that this was “improbable” for a few reasons, including a lack of signatures of genetic manipulation6. Since then, others have asked whether the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature that helps it to enter cells — is evidence of engineering, because SARS-CoV-2 has these sites but its closest relatives don’t. The furin cleavage site is important because it's in the virus's spike protein, and cleavage of the protein at that site is necessary for the virus to infect cells.
After the WHO report: what’s next in the search for COVID’s origins But many other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, such as coronaviruses that cause colds7. Because viruses containing the site are scattered across the coronavirus family tree, rather than confined to a group of closely related viruses, Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says the site probably evolved multiple times because it provides an evolutionary advantage. Convergent evolution — the process by which organisms that aren’t closely related independently evolve similar traits as a result of adapting to similar environments — is incredibly common.
Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A Medium article that speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do — a “smoking gun”, hinting that researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.
Andersen says that Baltimore was incorrect about that detail, however. In SARS-CoV-2, about 3% of the nucleotides encoding arginine are CGG, he says. And he points out that around 5% of those encoding arginine in the virus that caused the original SARS epidemic are CGG, too. In an e-mail to Nature, Baltimore says Andersen could be correct that evolution produced SARS-CoV-2, but adds that “there are other possibilities and they need careful consideration, which is all I meant to be saying”.
” Natural origin “When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2-related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.”
” Some key questions lie at the heart of investigations into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, including what is known about the earliest COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China, and what can be learned from them? Despite assertions to the contrary (1), it is now clear that live mammals susceptible to coronaviruses, including raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides), were sold at Huanan Market and three other live-animal markets in Wuhan before the pandemic (2, 3). Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs) were found in raccoon dogs during the SARS outbreak, which was facilitated by animal-to-human contact in live-animal markets in China.”
Put your quotes in italics, like this (replace brackets with "<>"): (i)put the stuff you want to quote here(/i)
As for clickable links, you do this (replace brackets with "<>"): (a href="the URL address here in quotes")HERE YOU PUT THE STUFF YOU WANT THE LINK TO SAY(/a)
Also, always preview and edit if necessary. You can test out your link by clicking on it and it should show up in a new tab. Then you post.
As an aside, if you don't put the stuff you quote in italics, we might think it's actually you writing smart stuff.
You have to forgive Ahmed not being good at self reflection. It requires self knowledge which there is non in Ahmed’s case.
“ As an aside, if you don't put the stuff you quote in italics, we might think it's actually you writing smart stuff.”
I don’t take responsibility for you not being smart Ahmed. I’m smart enough to understand that. Quotation marks is more efficient, time saving and therefore requires a larger paycheck than your inefficient lazy brain method. It all comes down to smart getting payed more. You ought to get payed less based on your belief.
Matt: some ideologues are as you suggest, but really what most art degree people (as you disparagingly call them) do, is to start with the collation of narratives. And they are not wrong, not because one can uncritically extend those narratives from relatively small samples to the whole, but simply because the quality of data which underlie putatively scientific tests are generally so poor that few correlations can be drawn, and still less any causational conclusions -- see Lars Syll on that. So the science types end up no further ahead, and tend just to overstate the significance of their results, especially in publish or perish, or publish or be defunded environments. You do not get a lot of funding for admitting you really don't know the answer. One place where the science approach obviously works better is when one is in dealing with fundamental identities -- such as the sectoral balances (and yes you have in past noted the periodic failure of art degree people to align their narratives with basic accounting). It is true that aimless personal anecdotes about whatever economic phenomena are no substitute for evidence; on the other hand, if you gather enough anecdotes, you can reach some useful conclusions about the state of things, to actually develop testable hypotheses. We have to accept uncertainty and combine approaches intelligently.
Here are an interesting three paragraphs from a Sesquiotica blog post:
"Our primary use of logic is for justifying things we desire. I’m not going to give you a lengthy disquisition on psychology, but if you don’t believe me, you can find plenty of lengthy disquisitions on psychology that support this. I’m not saying that logic is all just a mask for feeling, or that we never use logic to override our initial desires – heck, if we desire to be logical, then logic itself serves that desire – but your plain, well-stated logic serves some real-world effect you desire, and it will hit a brick wall if does not serve what your readers desire.
So you have to frame things in terms of what your readers desire and fear. You don’t have to be obvious about it, but you should at least be aware of what desires and fears are summoned by the words and images you use. There’s a reason that some politicians talk about “family” this and “family” that so much even when they’re busy harming a lot of families. There’s a reason they frame so many things in terms of “safety” or “security.” There’s a reason racists can seem so remarkably concerned with hygiene.
You may think I’m telling you to be sneaky and manipulative. I’m not. I’m telling you to be conscious. Be aware of every note you’re playing on readers’ heartstrings; you’re playing them whether you know it or not. And remember, as you lead them through ups and downs in your exposition of a factual topic, you’re doing what they want you to. They’re there because they want to be glad they’ve read what you’ve written, and one thing that makes them glad they’ve read it is a good experience of reading it."
In my view as a professional philosopher and student of the history of thought, justification goes beyond just logic to the very basis of logic, that is, world-views that provide the context for language use and establish criteria for cultures and subcultures.
One can view the history of thought as rationalizations for particular lifestyles. From within the world view, the foundations seem "natural" (innate) since one is inculcated with the world view through the developmental process.
Science is capable of revealing some biases but not all since science, too, is itself effected by being embedded in a world view. World views provide the context which gives specific meaning to ordinary language and while formal language attempt to exclude this limitation, it cannot be escaped entirely, it seems.
A major issue arises given this realization in that some people that understand the process will use this knowledge for their own purposes. This is the basis of propaganda and other forms of deception, as well as PR and advertising to a degree. And objectivity in the media is a joke since one of the purposes of media and media control is to exert influence on the narrative.
13 comments:
Doing an Ahmed but more with less bull.
“ Does the virus have features that suggest it was created in a lab?
Several researchers have looked into whether features of SARS-CoV-2 signal that it was bioengineered. One of the first teams to do so, led by Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, determined that this was “improbable” for a few reasons, including a lack of signatures of genetic manipulation6. Since then, others have asked whether the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature that helps it to enter cells — is evidence of engineering, because SARS-CoV-2 has these sites but its closest relatives don’t. The furin cleavage site is important because it's in the virus's spike protein, and cleavage of the protein at that site is necessary for the virus to infect cells.
After the WHO report: what’s next in the search for COVID’s origins
But many other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, such as coronaviruses that cause colds7. Because viruses containing the site are scattered across the coronavirus family tree, rather than confined to a group of closely related viruses, Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says the site probably evolved multiple times because it provides an evolutionary advantage. Convergent evolution — the process by which organisms that aren’t closely related independently evolve similar traits as a result of adapting to similar environments — is incredibly common.
Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A Medium article that speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do — a “smoking gun”, hinting that researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.
Andersen says that Baltimore was incorrect about that detail, however. In SARS-CoV-2, about 3% of the nucleotides encoding arginine are CGG, he says. And he points out that around 5% of those encoding arginine in the virus that caused the original SARS epidemic are CGG, too. In an e-mail to Nature, Baltimore says Andersen could be correct that evolution produced SARS-CoV-2, but adds that “there are other possibilities and they need careful consideration, which is all I meant to be saying”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
And one more.
” Natural origin
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2-related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
And another.
” Some key questions lie at the heart of investigations into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, including what is known about the earliest COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China, and what can be learned from them? Despite assertions to the contrary (1), it is now clear that live mammals susceptible to coronaviruses, including raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides), were sold at Huanan Market and three other live-animal markets in Wuhan before the pandemic (2, 3). Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs) were found in raccoon dogs during the SARS outbreak, which was facilitated by animal-to-human contact in live-animal markets in China.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454
“ Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand”
How can a protein compound have a “relative!” ?
You really have a reading disability….
Do you think water and hydrogen peroxide are cousins?
Chemistry is not analogous with taxonomy.
You have to forgive S400. He's new at quoting.
Put your quotes in italics, like this (replace brackets with "<>"): (i)put the stuff you want to quote here(/i)
As for clickable links, you do this (replace brackets with "<>"): (a href="the URL address here in quotes")HERE YOU PUT THE STUFF YOU WANT THE LINK TO SAY(/a)
Also, always preview and edit if necessary. You can test out your link by clicking on it and it should show up in a new tab. Then you post.
As an aside, if you don't put the stuff you quote in italics, we might think it's actually you writing smart stuff.
You have to forgive Ahmed not being good at self reflection. It requires self knowledge which there is non in Ahmed’s case.
“ As an aside, if you don't put the stuff you quote in italics, we might think it's actually you writing smart stuff.”
I don’t take responsibility for you not being smart Ahmed. I’m smart enough to understand that.
Quotation marks is more efficient, time saving and therefore requires a larger paycheck than your inefficient lazy brain method. It all comes down to smart getting payed more. You ought to get payed less based on your belief.
“ You can test out your link”
Art Degree people don’t test,,, they begin with a thesis first…
Matt: some ideologues are as you suggest, but really what most art degree people (as you disparagingly call them) do, is to start with the collation of narratives. And they are not wrong, not because one can uncritically extend those narratives from relatively small samples to the whole, but simply because the quality of data which underlie putatively scientific tests are generally so poor that few correlations can be drawn, and still less any causational conclusions -- see Lars Syll on that. So the science types end up no further ahead, and tend just to overstate the significance of their results, especially in publish or perish, or publish or be defunded environments. You do not get a lot of funding for admitting you really don't know the answer. One place where the science approach obviously works better is when one is in dealing with fundamental identities -- such as the sectoral balances (and yes you have in past noted the periodic failure of art degree people to align their narratives with basic accounting). It is true that aimless personal anecdotes about whatever economic phenomena are no substitute for evidence; on the other hand, if you gather enough anecdotes, you can reach some useful conclusions about the state of things, to actually develop testable hypotheses. We have to accept uncertainty and combine approaches intelligently.
Here are an interesting three paragraphs from a Sesquiotica blog post:
"Our primary use of logic is for justifying things we desire. I’m not going to give you a lengthy disquisition on psychology, but if you don’t believe me, you can find plenty of lengthy disquisitions on psychology that support this. I’m not saying that logic is all just a mask for feeling, or that we never use logic to override our initial desires – heck, if we desire to be logical, then logic itself serves that desire – but your plain, well-stated logic serves some real-world effect you desire, and it will hit a brick wall if does not serve what your readers desire.
So you have to frame things in terms of what your readers desire and fear. You don’t have to be obvious about it, but you should at least be aware of what desires and fears are summoned by the words and images you use. There’s a reason that some politicians talk about “family” this and “family” that so much even when they’re busy harming a lot of families. There’s a reason they frame so many things in terms of “safety” or “security.” There’s a reason racists can seem so remarkably concerned with hygiene.
You may think I’m telling you to be sneaky and manipulative. I’m not. I’m telling you to be conscious. Be aware of every note you’re playing on readers’ heartstrings; you’re playing them whether you know it or not. And remember, as you lead them through ups and downs in your exposition of a factual topic, you’re doing what they want you to. They’re there because they want to be glad they’ve read what you’ve written, and one thing that makes them glad they’ve read it is a good experience of reading it."
In my view as a professional philosopher and student of the history of thought, justification goes beyond just logic to the very basis of logic, that is, world-views that provide the context for language use and establish criteria for cultures and subcultures.
One can view the history of thought as rationalizations for particular lifestyles. From within the world view, the foundations seem "natural" (innate) since one is inculcated with the world view through the developmental process.
Science is capable of revealing some biases but not all since science, too, is itself effected by being embedded in a world view. World views provide the context which gives specific meaning to ordinary language and while formal language attempt to exclude this limitation, it cannot be escaped entirely, it seems.
A major issue arises given this realization in that some people that understand the process will use this knowledge for their own purposes. This is the basis of propaganda and other forms of deception, as well as PR and advertising to a degree. And objectivity in the media is a joke since one of the purposes of media and media control is to exert influence on the narrative.
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