I lost all respect for Matt Ridley years ago, when I wrote:
Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.
At this point, he is an irredeemable kook — but a well-connected and wealthy one, who gets invited to all kinds of events hosted by the corrupt, criminal kooks in charge of the US government. He was recently invited to address the NIH on the “lab leak” hypothesis, the discredited conspiracy theory that China intentionally engineered the COVID virus to wreak havoc on the West, but accidentally released into their home territory of Wuhan. It’s absurd. No one who knows anything about virology or molecular genetics thinks it is at all plausible, or credits it as valid in the face of all the evidence that it originated naturally from wild populations, or zoonosis.
Nevertheless, Ridly got invited to present his innuendo, lack of evidence, and leaps of illogic at a major meeting of the formerly prestigious NIH.
Must Trump get his face put front and center of everything?
Don’t trust me that the “lab leak” is a garbage hypothesis? Larry Moran and Lindsay Beyerstein both shredded these “lab leak” claims years ago, but conspiracy theories seem to be invulnerable to little things like evidence and reason.
Add another critic to the long list of knowledgeable scientists who find Ridley risible: Angela Rasmussen. She gives five really strong reasons why the “lab leak” nonsense is wrong, and also seems to have even less respect for Ridley and Bhattacharya than I do.
I don’t know Ridley’s motivation besides being a pompous literal coal baron who led the UK into the 2007 financial crisis with the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and who expects to be taken seriously despite the fact that he seems like a foppish secondary antagonist in a forgettable Dr. Who episode. Unfortunately, Ridley is taken seriously by his fellow pompous, insubstantial windbags, and even more unfortunately, they are the windbags in charge who invited him.
It is no mystery why Podcast Jay [Bhattacharya] rolled out the red carpet for the distinguished Viscount despite his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise on the topic. He knows that Matt Ridley is writing fiction. He shows up to launder conspiracist lies through an indignant upper class British accent in service of Bhattacharya’s ultimate goal: to declare all NIH research reckless, dangerous, and absolutely the worst thing we could possibly do. Better redirect the money for these irresponsible Alzheimer’s, HIV, and diabetes treatments to the White House. President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will know what to do with all those funds.
I don’t see enough news and criticisms of Bhattacharya — he’s in charge of the NIH, he’s an idiot, he’s busy dismantling the American scientific institutions, but mostly what gets into the press are the disastrous decisions of the bigger fools in the cabinet. Make no mistake, though, he’s one of the nastier parasites gnawing at the foundations of our science establishment.
And now he invited Ridley to speak. The Ridley who makes these kinds of ludicrous accusations:
You can tell what kind of man he is by the people he lumps together as enemies with Hamas: a couple of credible, qualified scientists and trans people. His right-wing politics are showing.
Just one more example of how the inmates are running this insane asylum. Welcome to the Death Spiral.
I’m a bit unsure on this part of PZ’s OP:
Aren’t deliberate engineering and lab leak somewhat separable? Even deliberate engineering itself might not entail nefarious purpose? And an isolated coronavirus that wasn’t engineered could leak from a lab.
Some people might link deliberate engineering to a lab leak.
I presume SARS-CoV-2 was neither engineered nor leaked from a lab. I thought Moran had done a great job of dissecting the lab leak way back when. But I am unsure on how lab leak ideas are being lumped with deliberate engineering. That might be one of several variant lab link ideas. And at this point I wonder why people are still holding to these ideas as COVID stemming from a natural or wild origin seems the winning idea.
@Hemidactylus:
You’re right that it’s true on the face of it that ‘lab leak’ and ‘deliberate engineering’ aren’t the same thing, and there are certainly scenarios in which ‘lab leak’ could possibly have happened without the engineering, especially given that studying coronavirus transmission patterns was part of the purpose of the lab in question. (Though, as I understand it, the documented transmission patterns make even that highly unlikely.)
The thing is that the entire reason why people jumped on the lab leak hypothesis to start with was to deliberately confabulate the two and blame the Chinese for this. They may be separate ideas scientifically, but politically they’re the same thing and the people trying to push a point are deliberately using the version of the hypothesis that’s at least vaguely plausible on the surface to lead people to the version of the hypothesis that serves their political ends.
jenorafeuer @3
Yeah I think you pretty much nailed it. And from the New Republic article by Lindsay Beyerstein:
So there is nothing wrong with including your emotions in your though processes, emotions are after all just a form of processing information about ourselves and our environment, but leta take for granted the premise that too much emotion is antithetical to rationality and good judgement, there is literally nothing more hysterical and emotional than an american conservative(read reactionary). Their entire political project is throwing a tempertantrum because the world doesnt conform to their childlike view of how it should ideally work. Climate change inconvenience you? Doesn’t exist. Trans people challenge the childrens stories your mommy and daddy told you when you were 3? Trans people arent real open the camps. Someone not giving in to whatever demand you make? Terrorists. Someone’s skin color or accent different and scary? Unlimited violence. The working people who make your way of life possible asking for slightly less exploitation? Kill them all. Literally everything is just denial and violence to make “the scary boogeyman man go away MOMMMYYYYY!!!!!”
No attempt to understand or reconcile with the world as it exists, or even had existed previously. No desire to build a long term world functional for all involved. Its all immediate gratification of whatever the most surface level needs and impulses they have, which honestly makes trump their perfect avatar.
Yo, PZ, thanks for reminding us of that post of yours from 2021! I notice that in all the five years since then, neither KG nor GOTS nor any other lab-leak proponents, have come back, either to offer new evidence to support their claims, or to admit they’d been wrong.
I just have a thought: if some of these conspiracy theories include the Chinese scientists or the Chinese CIA deliberately loosing the virus on the world (that’d be a deliberate lab leak, while I suppose that most of the theories concern an accidental one), if I was the Chinese CIA, I would not start the epidemic by deliberately spreading the virus around China! Pick somewhere else, for goodness sake!
And I would definitely choose a wild virus to spread around, a bioengineered one could be found out too easily.
I read a paper from Scripps in Nature in, must have been April or May 2020, from scientists whose first thought (just from looking at the genome) was that the virus might contain some bioengineered features. I seem to recall that the genome had been posted online in January 2020, so this paper that studied the actual structure and features of the virus came out quite quickly.
Paraphrasing the title: “Covid is definitely a wild virus”, and the paper discussed why. So, end of story right then.