daezor
1d ago
Disclaimer, I haven't looked into this topic at all. I just think there's a point that's often missed in these discussions:
When we're thinking about the likelihood of a novel virus emerging, we need to be anchored on a distribution according to population, not time, because each new human being is a new opportunity for a virus to take form. The relevant figure is: What percentage of the people who have ever lived are alive today? Seems like it's about 7%. So, the number of novel human viruses we should expect to see arise in our lifetime is about 7% of however many have arisen in all of history. Those are some good odds, if you're a virus!
But (more speculatively) it's worse than that, because viruses emerge from the interaction of more than one organism, not necessarily of the same species. A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc. Therefore, depending on how many steps it takes, the number of opportunities for viruses to arise will increase as the Nth power of population, with an extra bonus for the density of humans and animals all crammed into one small place. I would venture to say that the amount of genetic material being shuffled around nowadays in places like Wuhan is a situation without precedent in the whole history of life on Earth.
daezor
1d ago
We're all stuck in a maze of ideological contradictions with no escape. That's why I'm somewhat more sympathetic to Nikole Hannah-Jones than most of the people here. She is someone who took Steve Bannon's words to heart:
When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think ... A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society.
In other words, a group recruited from the top N% highest-IQ people from all over the world is not really a nation (society, community, etc.). They may be economically successful, but they'd be missing something important of non-monetary value. At least, Steve Bannon seemed to think so. And recall, it's the immigration hardliners on the right (including Bannon, and those further to the right) who say: "Citizenship is not a question of merit. If you're a Talented-Tenth individual from a 3rd-world country, then your responsibility is to stay there and help lead your country. You abandoning your people to come here will just make both our country and yours worse off."
This is precisely what Nikole Hannah-Jones wanted.
But of course, all of this is living in a fantasy world that either never existed, or at least hasn't existed for a long time. Unilaterally "cooperating" while everyone else around you is shamelessly "defecting" will just bring misery upon yourself without achieving any benefit in the end.
I think this is a statistical fallacy of the same sort as "John Q Public just won the lottery! But the odds of that happening without him cheating were only 1 in a billion. Therefore we know with p<10^-9 that John Q Public must have cheated." This only makes sense if we had some prior reason to focus on John Q Public; but if he was just the person that happened to win the lottery of the millions who played, then this cancels out the p-value, leaving us with no particular reason to believe that he cheated.
Similarly, if we assume natural origin, whatever sequence of events ends up creating a successful virus is going to seem fantastically unlikely, but we also have to consider all the plasmids that didn't go viral (i.e. the losing lottery tickets). We had no prior reason to focus on any particular combination of human/animal interactions; that was just the ticket that happened to win.
(I don't actually know where the idea that pangolins were involved came from. Maybe they weren't. But if the reason for the scarcity of pangolins is because they're all being hunted for sale at the Wuhan wet market, well...)
Off the top of my head, Africa gave us HIV and Ebola. Can't think of any from India - maybe it's because people in India are vegetarians and so they don't have markets where hundreds of different animal species are all concentrated in close proximity? (I'm really just spitballing here to be honest.) But China has very high population and density as well, with mediocre health and sanitation, so a virus coming from there is no big surprise.
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