This Feb. 20th Twitter thread from Trevor Bedford argues against the lab-escape scenario. Do read the whole thing, but I’d say that the key points not addressed in parent comment are:
Data point #1 (virus group): #SARSCoV2 is an outgrowth of circulating diversity of SARS-like viruses in bats. A zoonosis is expected to be a random draw from this diversity. A lab escape is highly likely to be a common lab strain, either exactly 2002 SARS or WIV1.
But apparently SARSCoV2 isn’t that. (See pic.)
Data point #2 (receptor binding domain): This point is rather technical, please see preprint by @K_G_Andersen, @arambaut, et al at http://virological.org/t/the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/398… for full details.
But, briefly, #SARSCoV2 has 6 mutations to its receptor binding domain that make it good at binding to ACE2 receptors from humans, non-human primates, ferrets, pigs, cats, pangolins (and others), but poor at binding to bat ACE2 receptors.
This pattern of mutation is most consistent with evolution in an animal intermediate, rather than lab escape. Additionally, the presence of these same 6 mutations in the pangolin virus argues strongly for an animal origin: https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.13.945485v1…
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Data point #3 (market cases): Many early infections in Wuhan were associated with the Huanan Seafood Market. A zoonosis fits with the presence of early cases in a large animal market selling diverse mammals. A lab escape is difficult to square with early market cases.
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Data point #4 (environmental samples): 33 out of 585 environmental samples taken from the Huanan seafood market showed as #SARSCoV2 positive. 31 of these were collected from the western zone of the market, where wildlife booths are concentrated. 15⁄21 http://xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/27/c_138735677.htm…
Environmental samples could in general derive from human infections, but I don’t see how you’d get this clustering within the market if these were human derived.
One scenario I recall seeing somewhere that would reconcile lab-escape with data points 3 & 4 above is that some low-level WIV employee or contractor might have sold some purloined lab animals to the wet market. No idea how plausible that is.
I’m middle-aged now, and a pattern I’ve noticed as I get older is that I keep having to adapt my sense of what is valuable, because desirable things that used to be scarce for me keep becoming abundant. Some of this is just growing up, e.g. when I was a kid my candy consumption was regulated by my parents, but then I had to learn to regulate it myself. I think humans are pretty well-adapted to that sort of value drift over the life course. But then there’s the value drift due to rapid technological change, which I think is more disorienting. E.g. I invested a lot of my youth into learning to use software which is now obsolete. It feels like my youthful enthusiasm for learning new software skills, and comparative lack thereof as I get older, was an adaptation to a world where valuable skills learned in childhood could be expected to mostly remain valuable throughout life. It felt like a bit of a rug-pull how much that turned out not to be the case w.r.t. software.
But the rise of generative AI has really accelerated this trend, and I’m starting to feel adrift and rudderless. One of the biggest changes from scarcity to abundance in my life was that of interesting information, enabled by the internet. I adapted to it by re-centering my values around learning skills and creating things. As I contemplate what AI can already do, and extrapolate that into the near future, I can feel my motivation to learn and create flagging.
If, and to the extent that, we get a “good” singularity, I expect that it will have been because the alignment problem turned out to be not that hard, the sort of thing we could muddle through improvisationally. But that sort of singularity seems unlikely to preserve something as delicately balanced as the way that (relatively well-off) humans get a sense of meaning and purpose from the scarcity of desirable things. I would still choose a world that is essentially a grand theme park full of delightful experience machines over the world as it is now, with all its sorrows, and certainly I would choose theme-park world over extinction. But still … OP beautifully crystalizes the apprehension I feel about even the more optimistic end of the spectrum of possible futures for humanity that are coming into view.