You can't expect him to restrict his criticism to the content of your arguments and not your person if you claim your argument must be true because you have a PhD and no time to retype your essay for us lowlifes.
I didn't say my argument must be true because I have a PhD. I said you should trust that I'm not talking out of my ass because I have a PhD.
I'd much rather you read my arguments and criticize my content.
The fact is, criticisms in these things come from all angles. I was simply preempting one type of criticism in saying I have a PhD so I have thought about this and studied it a lot.
And then directly responding to another (that reddit is full of crap) by saying the content is what's important anyway.
I'm not saying I'm right because I have a PhD. In the post I drectly say "I'd much rather you read the arguments anyway"
I would like to criticise your content but you haven't posted any. You have simply claimed the posters claims #1 and #3 were false "because you said so".
Anyways I applaud and respect you for working your way up to the PhD and I am sure you are trying your best to spread the truth, but it would be more effective if you rehashed the main parts of that essay for all the readers here to see if you want to clear up whatever errors the poster has put out into the world.
The core argument of your Reddit post addressing gain-of-function research is that GoF research causes the sugars on the surface of the virus to be lost.
But that doesn't address the recombination event / recombinant virus, which is what the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis seem to be arguing (spike protein from one virus combined with backbone from another virus)
The core argument is actually one of occam's razor. Is such a recombinant /technically/ possible? Yes.
How many new assumptions does it require? A lot. Lots of people who help cover it up, lots of people who get sick and say nothing, lots of samples destroyed. And then also the epidemiological and genetic evidence doesn't support it.
How many new assumptions do you need for the zoonosis theory? Very few. It consists almost entirely of phenomena we know occur in nature, via mechanisms already described and known to occur at a frequent enough time scale to make it not just plausible, but probable.
Also, I just want to reiterate here, we virologists have literally been saying this is going to happen from nature FOR YEARS.
People like Michael Osterholm and Peter Daszak and Vincent Muenster and Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli have been saying this was going to happen /for years/. It was a matter of "when" not "if" to us virologists. We absolutely saw the writing on the wall and saw specifically SARS-1 and MERS and knew that meant there were likely other coronaviruses that could emerge.
But funding was always so low, because the viruses weren't currently infecting anybody! So the sampling efforts were always very minimal and underfunded!
And now, because of the lab leak theory, that has actually gotten worse, not better!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)
