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No, but disease, especially infectious disease, has in fact gotten a whole lot better. Parents no longer routinely bury three, four, or more of their children before age 10, at least not in places where they've been able to apply knowledge gained through science. You don't think that's an...

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they create a new function. Ignoring that reality won't make it go away. Yeah, that's wrong, too. Random mutations can be observed to generate new functions at quite a respectable rate, we can observe closely related genes with different functions and reconstruct...

Some functional mutations damage genes or their expression. Others don't. For example, in dog breeds, mutations that change the number or content of tandem repeats make big contributions to the morphology of different breeds (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0408118101), but most of...

Define 'specificity of the gene'. How do we measure it? I ask because on any meaning I can come up with, random mutations can either increase or decrease the specificity of a gene. They can also destroy genes entirely and create entirely new ones. Overall, your assertions about genetics in...

You cannot naturally select a mutation into existence. You can very much naturally select a new trait into existence, based on selection operating on random mutations. Your argument is based on equivocating between different meanings of 'anything' in the preceding sentence and your conclusion...

Which mutations do you think are directed? All of them or just a few?

Adding sarcasm helps not at all, especially when you don't seem to have any knowledge of how the research world works. They weren't do any research for the US government -- they were doing research with government-funded US researchers. And yes, they absolutely would have published the viruses...

For some reason I first read this as 'nun-of-the-mill', which worked surprisingly well when I got to the next word.

They would absolutely lie, just as they lied about whether live animals were being sold at the market. However, they'd previously made public the viruses they were working on. Since they had no way of knowing that this one would escape, they would have had no reason not to include it as well...

Thanks, but I was already clear on the the cast of characters. @Jipsah attempted to refute the idea that Chinese people eat bats. Which was pretty odd, because no one at all has claimed that Chinese people do eat bats or that eating bats had anything to do with the origins of covid. Which I...

I've never had the idea that people were eating bats. You really should read the threads you're responding to.

Leaving my question unanswered: who has suggested that eating bats had anything to do with the origin of the pandemic?

You need to fill out the context more if you want to draw sound conclusions here. The choice is on the one hand a deadly virus coming from a wet market, a kind of market that is strongly suspected of having been the source of multiple previous outbreaks of deadly viruses, including the first...

You seem to have missed the point rather badly, which was that the someone in question hadn't disappeared if she was giving interviews. No claims have been made about the accuracy of her interview. I don't think you need to convince anyone here that the Chinese government ranks pretty low as a...

You might note that I actually do do my own research on the epidemiology and evolution of SARS-CoV-2, which does not mean browsing the web.

Yes, I did. It does not provide any evidence for your claim about older delivery men either. Do you have any evidence for that? As for the article that's the basis of the link, it's highly subjective, badly misinterprets at least one input piece of data, and is internally inconsistent. It's a...

I asked you for evidence for the oddly specific claim that older delivery men from the market carried the virus to the market. You didn't. And no, we can't test the virus to see if it came from wild animals because it hasn't been found in any wild animals. We can test the virus to see if it...

And the evidence for this is...? Let's see... Your first sentence makes no sense. The second is evidence that SARS-CoV-2 didn't come from the lab because it doesn't match any virus known to have been present there. The third is fabrication -- we don't know any such thing. The final sentence is...

By the way, if anyone is interested in people trying to do biblically-based theology that doesn't simply dismiss evolution, I'm currently reading an interesting collection published by Eerdmans, called Evolution and the Fall. It's got contributions from a wide range of theological traditions.

No, the scientific evidence suggests strongly that it spread to humans from the Wuhan market. They could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or with any of an unknown number of other coronaviruses.