I posted this in the other thread about this:
1. This study wasn’t done at an institution with a legitimate reputation of scientific discovery.
2. This wasn’t published in a legitimate journal.
In other words, don’t conflate this trash with a study performed in Harvard and published in nature or science.
3. The reason they give for a smoking gun is not at all a legitimate scientific argument. Evolution often results in new or unique restriction sites. There are hundreds of restriction enzymes and restriction sites, it’s very easy to find a unique site around a specific region of a given sequence.
4. They never actually specify the intelligent design aspect, which would be the difficult part of making a man made virus that works so well. For every mutation there are 20 possibilities, and it’s not easy to predict what kind of substitution would result in a more stable interaction with the ace 2 receptor. If it were as easy as looking at structure and designing by prediction there would be a ton of completely synthetic proteins used for therapeutics.
So if there were 10 mutations that’s 20^10 possibilities to sample. And these mutations aren’t all consecutive, making it even far more convoluted. A more plausible idea would be a robust selection, using a completely synthetic pool or a modified pool of the previous iteration of the spike protein. That is possible, but would be extremely difficult.
This study/ paper is the equivalent of a counterfeit toy that falls apart when you unwrap. Any scientist can tear this apart. Find me one legit scientist with a reputable lab and publishing history that would entertain this paper.
If you want to believe this might be man made that is fine, but that is no excuse for not recognizing when something is utter bullshit and not realizing the difference between legit and illegitimate scienc