• Whorish_Ooze [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, there is. A engineered organism will show signs of "intelligent design", the genetic differences will be specifically just the ones chosen with intent to certain things. Evolutionary developed organisms are naturally selected random mutations that just happen to "work better", not necessarily best or well thought out. For example, there's no reason why a genetically engineered organism would have changes made it the 99% of its DNA (or RNA in this case) that's non-coding. Whereas evolution would collect changes to that 99% of its DNA along with any other beneficial changes to the coding part thats only 1% of its genome.

      • Wheaties [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Coming from a lab doesn't necessarily mean it was actively engineered. What's to stop it mutating naturally within a lab culture?

        • Whorish_Ooze [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If it came from a lab, it could probably be mutated from SARS-COV-1 or MERS-COV, as both of those were the most notable viruses that would be being studied in a lab. Instead, the virus appeared to come from the same lineage as wild viruses in the area. There's obviously a CHANCE that it could have by coincidence acquired all those same mutations as the wild population, but its so ridiculously small that it can be thrown out as signficiantly impossible.

        • AbbysMuscles [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Here's another paper - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054935/ that specifically talks about COVID-19's unlikelihood of being engineered. The line "The absence of a logical targeted pattern in the new viral sequences and a close relative in a wildlife species (bats) are the most revealing signs that SARS-CoV-2 evolved by natural evolution" stood out to me.

          • GalacticFederation [none/use name]
            hexagon
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            I was expecting you to cite a scientific law that stated “all viruses that leak out of labs can always be detected”, an impossible bar for you to pass, as there is no such law.

            I don’t know why you bothered frantically searching for that. It has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

            • Whorish_Ooze [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              A scientific law? What the fuck are you talking about? I mean you could be sure with 5 sigma orso that an entity with this genome was designed by a person with a certain intent, or was the product of natural evolution. There's no such thing as knowing with absolute certainty in any kind of science, all you can do is reject the null hypothesis with n degrees of confidence. In this case, you can reject that SARS-Cov-19 was developed by artificial genetic manufacture within an acceptable degree of certainty.