I too get what you’re saying, it’s just that’s a bit of hyperbole. We make all the viruses emerge. They were in their natural reservoirs, where-ever they may be, some of them for a very long time. Then we go there, and they emerge.
I’m just glad we got lucky. There’s a lot worse stuff we could have helped emerge than this.
The truth of that statement only depends on how much we feel like arguing over the technical definition of “novel infection mechanism”. Building a hybrid monster out of known parts has been feasible since the early 00s, arguably earlier, and has only gotten easier since then.
Yes. The point is that the protein spike would be one of those known parts. This one has a novel protein spike.
There are several techniques already available that can generate novel variations in protein structure and then screen those variations for increased binding. Usually those techniques are employed for finding better drugs or figuring out what parts of proteins do, but they can be repurposed for any screenable endpoint. It’s the kind of project that even. a single bench scientist could crank out fairly rapidly.
To play along a bit: if I were the leader of some powerful country inclined to design a virus for a weapon like, say, the United States (I believe it and Russia are the only ones allowed to have smallpox and we’re sure that they’ve never considered weaponizing that, right?) I would absolutely direct my weapon makers to make the virus as non-novel and boring as possible, lest people get suspicious.
So now we can add covid-19 to a list of potentially fatal viruses that includes HIV, smallpox, rabies, rotavirus, marburg, dengue, ebola, hantavirus, MERS, and SARS,
While I think the virus most probably spontaneously or at least accidentally jumped to humans from other species, I do think that forces greater than individual humans are at play - it explains for example why some people are so eager to sacrifice real human lives for abstract concepts like “economy”.
I know this is controversial, but large memetic complexes are kinda like meta-lifeforms. You can tell which ones are threatened by how they are responding to the pandemic.
One of the required vaccines to work at Porton Down is the smallpox vaccine, so I’m almost certain that we have a stock of it in the UK.
Large memetic complexes are people, my friend.
Just looked it up. I’m guessing that they get their vaccines from the CDC. The only places allowed to have Smallpox are the CDC in Atlanta and the VECTOR Institute in Koltsovo.
This. The same techniques that are used to screen small molecules for drug candidates (millions of candidates in a week or so with high-throughput screening and high-content screening) could be used to screen proteins for increased binding. So if you had, say, the resources of a small-to-medium sized pharma company you could custom-build a virus to do almost whatever you wanted, with just the available “spare parts” on the shelf.
I wish I could like that twice 
Concepts like “corporations are people”, “money is free speech”, or concepts of dogma and heresy in religion can be seen as defense mechanisms. As memetic concept gets more entrenched it becomes more religion-like. Right wing dogmatic belief that capitalism is a best possible system is a good example.
Another good example is comparison between Soviet communism and religion made by Gustaw Herling Grudziński in his book “The World Apart”, in which he describes horrors of Soviet gulag where he was imprisoned for two years.
It looks like Porton Down did destroy their stock, but they probably only did it when the CDC were allowed to keep theirs.
And weirdly, if the DIC is bad enough it actually can consume all the clotting factors and leave the patient to hemorrhage uncontrollably. I find the effects strange, but very consistent with a virus that homes in on the ACE2 receptor. Kidneys are loaded with them, so is the heart and blood vessels. Throw in that this is new, like really new, like maybe 5 months? First known case in the US was in late January. 3 months ago. The amount of damage done in that time is amazing, but the lack of knowledge about the virus and what it can do is completely consistent.
it’s worse than a mind virus, it’s a structure of systems with real world cybernetic ( in the original sense of the word ) feedback. that’s what dawkins and pkd failed to see. ( well, pkd did talk about the iron prison and the eternal roman empire, so he might have been closer. )
you can see this happening right now. where by lifting restrictions businesses are forced to open to pay rent, and employees are forced to work because of unemployment rules. i say “forced” because people need to eat.
in turn, small businesses will close ( because customer counts will be down while costs are up, and also customers will die. ) the banks which need to be protected from the inevitable bankruptcies will be bailed out. the same businesses which already have a leg up run by the same people advocating for reopening will become more entrenched.
but that system is not merely a meme or mind-virus. it’s driven by basic human needs, and the laws and police force ( example: eviction ) that support our ways of fulfilling ( or not ) those needs. that its needs are mismatched from our needs is of little relevance ( to it, anyway. )
the desire for medicare for all might be a mind-virus, but our actual health care system is a system that sustains itself ( at our own human expense )
Leveraging from this to make a point (and not trying to pick on you, sorry) but layfolk generally think about evolution incorrectly, leading to a sense of surprise about something like this. Evolution doesn’t have goals or destinations. People always talk about the “reasons” certain body features were created and such. That’s really a form of anthropomorphism of what is a passive emergent property of a complex system. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but evolution doesn’t “do”, evolution just “is”. The presumption of agency in things is so automatic for us that we constantly assign goals and strategies to evolution without realizing it, just in the way we discuss it.
Funny you should say that, since I’m reading Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory now, wherein trees are depicted as having all sorts of long-unrecocgnized (by humans) agency. Maybe the question becomes just what agency is, but if what Powers dramatizes is true, it does seem worth recognizing that seemingly insensate and independent trees effectively communicate and work with each other. (Not that I think you’d deny such, um, agency exists and matters.)
Well put. In one of my favorite lectures, Richard Dawkins expands on your point:
and the flu
