“One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of a congressional subcommittee,” bemoaned David Quammen last month in The Washington Post. “The question is this: Where did the virus that causes covid-19 come from?”
Inquiring minds want to know.
Science writer Quammen admits “the origin question is a seductive one,” but argues it is a “mystery” these congresspeople “will be least likely and least qualified to solve — and they should focus their mission elsewhere.”
While our career congresspeople do not, on the whole, sport the credentials best suited to the investigation, I’m sure they’ll invite some real-life scientists to testify. Moreover, the idea of telling folks — even politicians — not to worry their pretty little heads about an issue causing them concern . . . well, that might understandably rub you the wrong way.
The “science journalist” says it’s “a scientific question best left to scientists.”
Though also not a scientist, Quammen seems somehow to have settled upon the answer to the question . . . that he doesn’t want Congress asking.
He calls the origin of COVID-19 a “not-quite-solved mystery” since most “experts say they believe this virus almost certainly reached humans by natural spillover — that is, from a nonhuman animal host.”
Not via a lab-leak, mind you.
Yet, “almost certainly” doesn’t sound scientifically very certain at all. It does, however, fit well with Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
You decide whether Quammen’s prose is inspired by science or politics:
Consider one implication you might draw from a lab leak: We need less science, especially of the sort that fiddles with dangerous viruses. And from a natural spillover: We need more science, especially of the sort that studies dangerous viruses lurking in wild animals. From a lab leak: It was those foolish scientists in a Chinese lab who unleashed this terrible virus upon us. Suspicion, accusation, presumption of guilt and even a tincture of racism may therefore inform our relations with China, not an effort to encourage transparency and scientific exchange.
Catch that? It’s important that COVID’s origin be as Big Science says . . . or the racists win.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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9 replies on “A Question Best Left”
Threatening the narrative makes you a threat to national security.
Certainly it makes the corrupted national power manipulators less secure.
You are fixated on this. Assuming China is 100% responsible for the virus and released on purpose, what do you propose that the United States do? War with China? Make trading with China illegal? Both are absurd!
What is your proposal or proposals?
Pam, I doubt that China released the virus on purpose; and, from what I recall of Paul’s remarks, he too doubts that thesis.
The mere fact that the the virus were plausibly leaked from a Chinese laboratory tells us that our journalists and the centralized social media ought to apologize, and that the latter ought to compensate those whom they censored. Probably more importantly, the plausibility shows that US officials who circumvented President Obama’s order not to proceed with gain-of-function research should be treated as very great fools.
If indeed the virus were established to have been leaked from a Chinese laboratory then, while we could not do much about the Chinese perpetrators, Dr Fauci and his fellow Western conspirators should be tried by the International Court for a specific crime against humanity resulting in an extraordinary number of deaths.
If it were further proved that the Chinese state had effected the leak deliberately — again, something that Paul and I do not believe — then we’d have to recognize that the Chinese state were waging biologic war against the world. I wouldn’t suggest something such as launching a nuclear counter-attack, but all interactions with China in general and with the Chinese state in particular would have to be informed by the recognition of that war. Efforts to protect against further such attacks and attacks of other sorts would have to be extended and intensified, and at the least purchase of inessential items from Chinese sources should be brought to an end.
To me, all that seems rather obvious.
If it had come from a bat or other critter, the ChiComs would have touted their elimination of possible hosts.
A “nonhuman animal host” and a lab leak are not mutually exclusive. We know that this virus is found in horseshoe bats who live in caves hundreds of miles from the lab in Wuhan. There’s your ‘nonhuman animal host’. Gain of function research was being pursued in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There’s the ‘lab leak’.
The question is not likely answerable. Politicians will get the answers they want to get, and scientists won’t have access to enough data — for a number of reasons, including politics — to falsify or prove any particular proposition.
Which leaves us with basic tools of reason like Occam’s Razor, which tells us that it’s a lot more likely that the COVID-19 virus came out of the same process that the vast majority of infectious human diseases come from (and a process for which that part of Asia is well-known) — a natural mutation/jump from other animals to humans — than from a process which has almost never happened (the only exception I can think of is the anthrax attacks circa 2001).
As I have noted to you previously, your probabilistic argument is fallacious. If somehow, during the same span as most infectious diseases developed, labs such as that in Wuhan existed and were run in the same sloppy manner, the number of epidemics would have been vastly greater. Since we cannot observe just how many more, we cannot use those frequencies as a proxy for probabilities in the present era.
Your attempted application of Okham’s Razor entails prior reduction of a story to stylized facts, but that reduction elimimates some of the facts that a proper application would explain.
“Since we cannot observe just how many more, we cannot use those frequencies as a proxy for probabilities in the present era.”
Thank you for proving my argument correct instead of “fallacious.”
My argument is not “probabilistic.”
Occam’s Razor says to go with the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions.
All “if somehow” statements are additional assumptions.
And since scientists are unlikely to be able to gather new data or access old data held by the CCP, it’s simply not possible to turn any hypothesis into a testable/falsifiable theory.
Therefore, neither new probabilisms nor scientific investigation are likely to produce reliable answers.
Which leaves us, as I said, with the Razor. It’s not a great way to answer the question. Unfortunately, it’s the only answer we’re going to get that doesn’t fall under the heading “Comforting But Evidenceless Woo-Woo Which Confirms Our Priors.”
Mr Knapp,
Nope, your argument is about what you appropriately called “likely” answers, and Ockham’s Razor simply plays no rôle
whatsoever outside of probabilistic arguments.
(I caution you against the mistake of treating measurable probability as the full scope of probability. Probability is fundamentally a matter of plausibility orderings.)
Ockham’s Razor says that the model with the fewest needed assumptions to fit the facts is the most likely, but what you’ve done, by using stylized facts, is to omit some of the of the facts to which the model ought fit. As Einstein famously said, the theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler; you’ve unfortunately made it too simple to fit all the relevant facts as simply as possible.