Viral: The Origin of Covid 19 | Matt Ridley | EP 310

so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question when I first heard the argument that it might have come from a lab I said no no we're not nearly clever enough to design a virus this good um well once I found out what we were doing or what they were doing I was really shocked by how how far into the manipulation and testing of dangerous viruses we have gone in the last 10 years I'm trying to understand why there would be motivation to shut down let's say speculation investigation into the possibility of a lab leak and I guess maybe part of the reason is that it reveals a reality that in some sense is too Dreadful to conveniently comprehend it'd be easier in some sense in the short term just to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening but we also have another problem which is while the Chinese are pretty damn authoritarian and they're still run by the Communist party which is a dreadful organization we don't know how much our entanglement with the Chinese tilts us towards that totalitarian structure and so when the pandemic emerged the totalitarians acted first and they acted in a totalitarian way which is well why don't we just lock everyone down which is sort of the totalitarian answer to everything and then in our herd-like panic in the west we immediately imitated them that's the spread of a pathogen too right we have a pathogen of of covid to contend with but we also have a pathogen of totalitarian totalitarianism to contend with and I would say the latter poses a much bigger threat than the former lest we keep mucking about with gain of function research [Music] hello everyone I'm happy today to be speaking with Dr Matt Ridley one of the world's most well-known and lucidly minded rationalists I've spoken with Matt before on my podcast and we're going to talk today about among other things about the origin of the kovid virus so that should be entertaining Matt Ridley is a British writer journalist and public speaker he has a ba and D field degree from Oxford University Matt also worked for the economist for nine years as science editor he worked as a Washington correspondent and American editor as well before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman Matt writes a weekly column in the times of London and also writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal as Viscount Ridley he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013. and served on the Science and Technology select committee from 2014 to 2017. he won the Hayek prize in 2011 the Julian Simon award in 2012 and the free enterprise award from The Institute of economic Affairs in 2014. he's a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and of the Academy of Medical sciences and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences he is honorary president of the International Center for life in Newcastle Matt also holds honorary doctorates from Buckingham University Cold Spring Harbor laboratory and University Francisco American Guatemala his books have sold over a million copies being translated into 31 languages and have won several Awards his books include the Red Queen the origins of virtue genome nature via nurture Francis Crick the rational optimist the evolution of everything how Innovation Works and the revised and expanded version of his latest book viral the search for the origin of covid-19 we're going to talk about a variety of issues including not least the politicization of Science and and perhaps the politicization of everything but I think maybe we'll start by walking through your your book on the on the origin of covid-19 and so the first thing I'm curious about I suppose is why did you decide to investigate the origin of covid-19 why didn't you just accept the idea that it emerged in the in the exotic meat market and in in Wuhan and like a good boy let's say and leave it at that it's a good question and the answer is to start with I did accept the conventional version um but I was interested I'm a zoologist by background and I was interested in how these diseases jump uh and I thought it was highly likely this one had jumped like SARS did from a bat uh through the food chain but I wanted nowhere and when and how and I knew that the scientists in Wuhan had a an idea about a similar virus so I got the Wall Street Journal to commission an article from me called uh the bats behind the pandemic what was it about horseshoe bats that was um harboring such viruses how were people coming into contact with them what did we know what was the story in this case it was a very interesting story in the case of SARS in 2003 to do with food markets near Hong Kong what was going to be the story in this case and in investigating it I Came Upon anomalies like the fact that this virus was not particularly closely related to the bat one they had like they couldn't tell me where they found the bat one the paper that I read didn't give the location and the name of the virus the bat virus was one that didn't appear in the scientific literature and yet they said they'd found it previously so I was rather puzzled by all this and I called up a number of virologists and they said well yes there's some anomalies here we don't we don't understand but it's nothing to do with a lab leak you can rule that out now I believe that for about two and a half months and then I came across the work of Alina Chan who eventually became my co-author on this book and she was saying actually we can't rule out a lab leak there's quite a lot of things about this story that make it really quite plausible that what's happened here is a is an escape from a lab because we're dealing with a virus that turns up in the city which has the lab that does work on sars-like coronaviruses more than any other lab in the world and that geographical coincidence has to be taken seriously particularly when we find that the virus from the bat that they identified as being closely related to SARS cov2 had been found effectively in their own freezer and that's a a starting point for for a query so by the middle of May 2020 the Chinese were announcing they didn't think it started in that market uh Alina Chan was saying there's lots of evidence to suggest this thing is well adapted to human beings and the geographical coincidence all got me interested in uh this being an open question not a closed one and one that needed further investigation and the deeper I dug the more emerged okay so so let me summarize that so the first smoking pistol in some sense as you point out is the The Coincidence of the location of this lab which studies exactly this kind of virus and the outbreak itself and that's that's a problem right so that means that it's reasonable to look at that and think that well it could have escaped from a lab there that's the first conclusion and that it has to be demonstrated in some sense that it didn't and then so that's a problem and I can't see how that's anything but an incontrovertible problem the mere fact that that lab is there and that it does research on those types of viruses and that that's where the outbreak was doesn't prove that it originated in the lab but it certainly makes that a plausible hypothesis but then you add this additional twist which is I think more complicated for people to understand and you detail this out you you provide some detail for this in the book that this virus is somewhat remarkably well adapted to human beings now there are literally trillions and trillions of different forms of viruses and so obviously most of them aren't particularly well adapted to human beings because otherwise we would have trillions of viruses producing pandemics through all the time so it's generally the case that viruses are not well adapted to Transmission in human beings by the and that's true for the overwhelming majority of viruses and so the fact of this human adaptation or adaptation to human transmission is something of signal importance and so maybe you could walk me and everyone else listening through wide a typical virus isn't adapted to human transmission and what it means that one is and how that develops yes um the normal pattern when a virus first emerges into the human species is for it to be very difficult for the virus to spread human to human it can infect someone it can even possibly kill someone but they're not very good at passing it on to people the virus is not really very good at transmitting between members of this new host now if enough time goes by with enough infections happening then eventually it will get good at it and that's what was starting to happen with SARS in 2003 um it it first infected people in in the fall of 2002 by the spring of 2003 you were starting to see chains of transmission from person to person and the reason for this is that the virus has to evolve it has to change its genetic code in such a way that it can uh better fit The receptors on the cells of humans as opposed to The receptors on the cells of bats or in the case of SARS the intermediate host which was a a palm civet [Music] will the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more Reckless spending by a more emboldened Administration higher taxes deeper inflation if you are 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the environment and so this is a very naughty problem k-n-o-t-t-y for a virus to solve it's not simple at all because it has to not kill the host too quickly and it has to be able to replicate within an individual but then it not only does it have to manage those things which is very difficult also has to figure out how to transmit itself with some degree of Effectiveness and thank God most viruses can't solve that problem so this is a very thorny problem and and you were you're maybe you can outline for everyone how how viruses do solve that problem and why most don't and why the fact of human of human adaptation to humans is so important yeah so uh just to give you a good example bird flu which is a a big problem at the moment in poultry flocks and wild birds um is not very good at infecting human beings people can catch it people have even died of it if you're exposed to a huge dose by working in a poultry farm you can get sick and you'll probably die but you probably won't give it to anybody else we've not seen any human to human transmission of that virus this virus was good at transmitting between human beings from the word go from from the the November or December of 2019 and the reason for that we now know in molecular terms it has a so-called receptor binding domain on its Spike Gene which is well adapted to the human ace2 receptor on our cells not very well adapted to other species receptors which is intriguing um it's it's a specific human adaptation it looked well not specific it's not completely specific it's quite good at lots of of animals but it's really good at us okay and the other feature that it has that is very striking and very surprising is that it has something called a fearing cleavage site now this is a small section of the spike Gene that is coded by about 12 letters of RNA genetic code which has been inserted into it compared with all its close relatives and that gives it the ability to use a human enzyme called furin that is in all our in much of many of our cells in order to reconfigure the virus as it leaves the cell to make it uh to as it were prime it to attack another cell so it's actually using one of our enzymes to spread in the body this enables it to infect more tissues in the body and to multiply much more effectively so it's a it's the reason we're having a pandemic is the fearing cleavage site if that if this virus didn't have that it would probably have been pretty easy to control in the early months you said something very interesting and this is another piece of the puzzle I presume is that compared to other viruses of its type it has this interesting fear and cleavage site I've got that right and you said that it had been inserted and that's a uh well that's an anomalous statement let's say so there's something about this particular virus that sets it out against other viruses of its type and it's this particular ability to to use a human enzyme and you describe that as inserted and so I presume that could be inserted as a consequence hypothetically of natural selection processes or that there's other alternative explanations so so what do you see when you look at that what I mean by inserted here is that it's it's it's an extra piece of genetic information we can look at um 20 or 30 other very similar viruses and we can we can align their genomes up and match them up against this one and the the fearing cleavage site is not a an altered bit it's an added bit it's an extra chunk that's been added in the middle of the spike Gene so how how do you how do you differentiate between added and different I I presume that's a consequence of degree of Divergence so you could imagine that there's a set of viruses that are genetically and evolutionarily similar so they stem from a similar source and they have a predictable pattern of variation and you're saying that this is an anomaly that exists outside that well you you line them up you align the VAR the genetic codes of the viruses and in this particular part of the spike gene they all align up quite well you know the sequence is mostly the same you can tell it's been added because you can align the gene genes of uh the spike genes of other viruses alongside each other and see that this is an extra piece of of RNA not a changed piece of RNA it's about 12 letters long and This spells out a sequence that allows it's called a fury and cleavage site and it allows the virus to use a human enzyme called furin to spread from cell to cell from tissue to tissue and effectively makes the virus much more dangerous and much more transmissible it's the reason we're having a pandemic if the virus didn't have this fearing cleavage site we'd probably have been able to get it under control very easily early in the pandemic now what's interesting is that a number of Western virologists when they first saw the sequence of this virus said whoa it's got a fearing cleavage side in that's very unusual for a sars-like virus in fact it's Unique we've never seen one with this before there are other coronaviruses with fearing cleavage sites but not SARS like coronaviruses and they said I'm afraid that suggests it might have been engineered now they kept those thoughts to themselves we only know about them now because of leaks of emails that have emerged more than a year later but they got on a conference call at the beginning of February U.S and UK and other virologists about a dozen of them who are these days who are these people these this they that you're referring to that and and in the early stages of space station yeah these are virologists so senior virologists who've been studying this kind of virus or other similar outbreaks there's about a dozen of them but also on the call was Dr Anthony fauci the head of the National Institute of allergies and infectious diseases in the US and and the main advisor to the president on this and Dr Jeremy Farah a senior advisor to the British government and the head of the welcome trust in the UK which had funded a lot of research of this kind um and they discussed on this call their doubts that this virus was natural and they're worried that it might have been engineered within two days however that same group of virologists started drafting an article um which was eventually published in nature medicine saying it couldn't possibly have been engineered the fearing cleavage site will probably turn up in a wild bat virus well it hasn't so far and the reason they have given for changing their mind after these emails emerge showing what they were actually thinking in February is that the Chinese had announced they'd found a virus in a Pangolin you probably remember that a scaly anteater that is trafficked because of it the belief that it contributes to good medical health and so on if you eat its scales it's not true they're made of the same stuff as fingernails you might as well eat your finger nails but still it's a widely held belief and as a result many of these scaly anteaters are trafficked into China well it turns out that that a a university in China announced in February 2020 that they'd found a very similar virus and 99 similar virus in Pangolin and people thought right case closed we found the intermediate animal we know what's happening well there's three problems with that one when they eventually published the sequence of this Pangolin virus it was not very similar it was 90 similar that's not good enough it's nothing like close enough two it didn't have the fury and cleavage side in and three there were no pangolins on sale in Wuhan so it couldn't have explained how the outbreak happened oh yeah those are those are problems those are big problems so we're in this strange situation where this particular feature has alarmed Western virologists but they've kept the information to themselves we didn't find out about all this for months remember no it's worse than that it's worse than that because these virologists that you're talking about include fauci and so it's not just it's not just virologists it's it's the virologists who end up being in charge of the entire response and so the question that emerges for me there is that if they were concerned about this being a lab leak then why this strenuous attempt to deflect now there's two possible reasons one is that they didn't want to move forward with their presumption that it was a loudly lab leak without a smoking pistol and that's fair enough because you might think well we're we're concerned and we're incurring but we're not going to uh beat the drum about the lab leak till we're certain and then there's whatever other reasons might be lurking in the background and I suppose that's partly what we're trying to investigate and so that would be the Scandal that would emerge perhaps if it was a lab leak and what that might do to Chinese American relationships and what it says about virology research in general and and God only knows what other host of explanations and so but it's very striking to me so you've laid out you've laid out a story that goes well first of all there was a lab in Wuhan that was doing research that was strikingly similar on viruses that were strikingly similar to the virus that caused the pandemic and that is the geographical Locale of the origin of the pandemic and then the virus itself has peculiarities that might indicate engineering and so that's two pieces of evidence that are starting to converge pretty hard and unlikely convergence and then you have the virologists themselves including those who are in charge of the response or who will be eventually also noting that this looks uh suspicious to say the least and then for some reason and in a great scientific journal or at least a once great scientific journal downplaying their own fears and so what's the motivation here what what's going on precisely you don't ride an elevator for the music or choose an airline for their movie selection when it comes to audio entertainment it makes sense to choose audible audible is the home of Storytelling whether it's an epic adventure a chilling mystery or a can't miss comedy it houses all your audio entertainment audiobooks podcasts and Originals in one single app so that you can find the best of what you love or discover something new as an audible member you can choose one title per month to keep from their entire catalog including the latest best sellers and new releases members also get full access to a growing selection of included audiobooks audible originals and podcasts you can download or stream included titles all you want you can even listen to Dr Peterson's Beyond order on Audible let audible help you discover new ways to laugh Be Inspired or be entertained new members can try it for free for 30 days visit audible.com Peterson or text Peterson to 500-500 that's audible.com Peterson or text Peterson to 500 500 to try audible free for 30 days audible.com Peterson well um the the words an exchange of emails among these scientists in which um some of them said uh it's important that we uh don't damage International Harmony that was the phrase used by Francis Collins the head of the NIH in these emails and another one says we mustn't damage the reputation of science and of Chinese science in particular now at the same time another letter was you mean by by point do you mean by pointing out that something unbelievably and god-awfully and unforgivably dangerous had actually happened that was how we were going to damage the reputation so to speak by by just admitting that something catastrophic had happened and so it was reputation management yes but clearly you know if you there is a risk that the world rushes often comes to the conclusion it came out of a lab and this damages biotechnology and it's not true it might have right right yes in a natural way and then we've done and then we've done unnecessary damage to science which is a great pity and I you know I'm a big fan of biotechnology I I would think that was a problem so that is one risk but the other risk is that we are so worried about doing damage to the reputation of science that we Overlook the possibility that this thing did start in the laboratory um uh now at the same time also in February 2020 the closest collaborator of the Wuhan lab in the west a man named Peter dazak who runs an organization called Eco Health Alliance which had funneled millions of dollars from U.S taxpayers to This research in Wuhan over the years he was preparing a letter for the Lancet which he got 27 scientists to sign saying it was it couldn't possibly have come from a lab and we've got to shut down that possibility he didn't uh uh reveal his role in orchestrating that he did was just one of the signatures he didn't note his conflict of interest in that letter the fact that he was a very close collaborator and friend of the Wuhan lab it took 18 months before the Lancet published a statement of conflict of interest under pressure on that but more important than any of that the one crucial thing that Peter dazak didn't reveal and that we didn't find out until September 2021 was that he had put in an application to the uh Pentagon to the DARPA that research arm of the Pentagon um in 2018 in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of virology among others to do experiments on sars-like viruses that they found in bats and those experiments were to include if they found ones that weren't very similar to SARS one that were new were to include putting a furin cleavage site into such a virus now that is a major Discovery and as I say we found that out from a leaked document it's called the project defuse it came to light in September 2021 because someone in DARPA I think leaked it to people who were investigating this and Peter dazek hadn't bothered to tell us that he was the lead in investigator on exactly this proposal now you know for me as a as a citizen of the planet Earth that's pretty annoying as a scientist and and a writer about science um it's even more annoying because you know we all want to know what happened here you know I don't go into this wanting it to be a lab League I just want to know the truth and it seems absolutely vital to get us as much information as we can now some of that information is in China and they're not being very forthcoming but information that is in America ought to be volunteered in this case um the other thing that but the what the thing that the Chinese have failed to do is tell us what's in their database they had a database of with 22 000 entries in it at the Wuhan Institute of virology which was um Wildlife pathogens it was it was bacteria and viruses that affected Wildlife about 15 000 of them related to bats and most of those were viruses so these were the viruses they'd been collecting from Mostly not from Wuhan but from a long way away from Southern China and Laos and other neighboring countries and they'd been collecting thousands of these viruses and they'd been sequencing in them and they've been characterizing them and describing them and they had a database and the purpose of this database partly funded with U.S money was to predict and prevent future pandemics when uh in on the 12th of September 2019 that is about two months before the pandemic started as far as we can tell at two o'clock in the morning that database went offline it's never come back online uh we've never therefore been able to access it and look at what viruses they had in that lab now when we asked them why weren't you show us that database which after all the purpose of which was to share with the world so that we could predict pandemics remember um they say oh well people might hack it well that's a meaningless statement you know if you're going to share it you don't need to worry about people hacking it you know it's a sort of circular non-argument if you like um uh and and remember showing us what's in that database would be the quickest way to exonerate the Wuhan Institute of virology because it would show look they didn't have a virus resembling SARS cov2 in there in their database and so case closed but they won't show us that document and that for me is a very very important piece of information we'll get back to our conversation with Matt Ridley in just one minute first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary logos and literacy I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world illiteracy was the norm the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of scripts memorization today exists only because of what is sung amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan goodberg science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that yeah well this begs are broader this big is a broader question too that was popping up in my mind and perhaps this is a reasonable place to interject uh to broaden out the conversation we don't really know what the preconditions are for science to function as it has functioned let's say in the West for the last 400 years but it's certainly the case that real scientists and there are very few of them because most scientists are technicians in some real sense and they're certainly not on The Cutting Edge and they're worried about the pushing forward of their career let's say and other extraneous issues rather than concentrating on the science at hand it's an unbelievably stringently ethical Enterprise if you want to be a good scientist you have to assume that what you don't know should take priority over what you do know that's hypothesis testing in some real sense and you also have to be willing to go where the data takes you and you have to do your statistical analysis in the most honest possible manner and all of that requires the abiding by an extraordinarily stringent ethic and and yet we tend to think of science as a technical Enterprise and when we presume that it's a technical Enterprise we also presume that for example it could take place in any real sense in a totalitarian country that you can do science in a totalitarian country and it isn't obvious to me at all that you can do science in a totalitarian country and the reason for that is that in a totalitarian country everyone lies about everything all the time that's a very good point and that actually brings up questions that were raised in a report that came from the senate in recent weeks the help Committee of the Senate the Republican side of that committee has employed experts to spend a couple of um several months a year and a bit actually investigating exactly what was going on in that laboratory in Wuhan in 2018 19 and 20. and what they discovered was that there was some kind of Crisis over biosafety in the lab in in in November of 2019. um there were meetings very high level meetings uh Beijing got involved Xi Jinping himself seems to have been consulted um and the lab was basically given a major ticking off about failures on biosafety um and there's a lot of sort of self-examination going on but to your point these documents that revealed this are communist party documents um that is to say like every organization in China the Wuhan lab is basically run by the Communist party and as part of that you as a scientist have to keep reporting to the party what you're doing how hard you're working and how it's going to glorify the Communist party right right right to the part yes exactly and that's not science and well um you can do good science while doing that but it's very clear that the direction the party is giving you in 2019 is come on we want more results out of this science we haven't seen enough from these virology experiments um we need to to why aren't you getting more results getting more papers published Etc there's a real pressure on these scientists you can read you can read it in these documents to do more work but then there's also real pressure to for God's sake stop having these accidents or whatever it is it's never quite That explicit but uh you know um uh what can you do to solve these biosafety problems that you've got in the lab now all of that suggests that there was pressure to do risky experiments and there was pressure to clean up the safety record of the lab at the time that something started in Wuhan now again none of that proves that that's how it began but given the experiments that we know they were doing that they published these were Chimera virus experiments where you take uh part of the gene from one virus and you insert it into another in order to make a hybrid virus to see how dangerous the spiked Gene of the newly discovered virus is in a live virus that you know how to grow and those experiments resulted in up to ten thousand times increases in the infectivity of viruses in human cells human Airway epithelial cells is that the gain of function research that people refer to can't yes and the function that's being gained is trend is transmissible is transmissibleness is the capacity of the original gain of function debate yeah the original gain of function debate was about how to turn a bird flu into a mammal flu how to give it the new function of infecting mammal but but uh the the term then came to be used for increases in the infectivity or the virulence of viruses okay so okay so let me know all right so let me ask you a question about that so we've already established earlier in this conversation that there are trillions upon trillions of viral variants and a very very tiny fraction of those pose a human risk almost an infinitesimally small fraction and so the vast majority of viruses are harmless and so and then the theory would be well there are some that are still harmful and we need to understand those and fair enough and one of the ways of understanding them is to produce more dangerous viral variants in the lab and then we can study these more dangerous variants but that seems to me to assume that you're presuming that the more dangerous functions that you're adding to the viruses are in some sense going to be representative of more dangerous viruses in general so that you can generalize Beyond them and you're also assuming that the risk of an accident or an outbreak in relationship to poor handling of these new viruses that you're creating is less of a risk than natural variation in the viruses themselves would be likely to produce it isn't obvious to me at all a priority that any of those presumptions are even vaguely correct that's exactly right that's exactly the calculation that they were making um that it was worth doing this research because you would identify viruses that could cause a pandemic this way and that that risk would the risk of causing an accident was less than than that risk that we're running naturally um though there was a lot of criticism of this when they began this uh sort of research not just in Wuhan but elsewhere in the world um about 10 years ago uh uh under a U.S funded program called prevent um there was a number of virologists who quite openly said we think this is a mistake we think you're looking for a needle in the haystack you'll probably find the wrong needle um uh we don't think that you're going to find anything useful this way um and they didn't also add but there was other people saying and by the way aren't you creating the very risk that you're worrying about you're looking for a gas leak with a lighted match as someone put it um now I think most of us now looking at what was going on in Wuhan in that laboratory in the Years leading up to the pandemic um are convinced that even if this one didn't happen that way it could have and that going forward we should not be doing this kind of research well after a short pause the US government resumed its donations to the Eco Health Alliance to work with partner Labs doing this kind of research elsewhere in the world during and after the pandemic men is it time to stop mindless scrolling time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you're missing out on if this sounds familiar then on January 9th join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life it's called Exodus 90 and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life and it actually works independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days including stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages more meaningful prayer lives and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones for the past seven years Exodus has helped more than 60 thousand men build a road map for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction is it time for your Exodus we start January 9th find resources to prepare for Exodus at exodus90.com Jordan that's exodus90.com Jordan recently and there recently means October 27th in the journal science online and so so just for everyone watching and listening to know there's two journals in the world science and nature that are regarded by scientists in virtually every discipline as the Pinnacle of scientific publication and so if you're a career scientist and you publish in science or nature that's a career making publication it's the equivalent of a bestseller let's say or a hit movie in the scientific community and both science and nature are among the oldest of scientific journals and the most prestigious and they had their origin in the UK and so everyone in the scientific Community is uh has been for decades very impressed with science and nature so I'm telling everyone that just so you know the significance of this of this publication Outlet now there's an article there that was written by John Cohen on October 27 22 talking about this Senate investigation that Matt just referred to and let me read a little bit about this um the mysterious origin of the covid-19 pandemic like so many aspects of the response has created deep divides along party lines in the United States okay so that's the opening statement and so basically the opening statement is designed to convince both the writer and the reader that the primary issue here with regards to the lab leak hypothesis is one of politics and not of fact or science and then the article continues many virologists and evolutionary biologists who have studied the origins of outbreaks dismiss the lab leak hypothesis many virologists let's say but other scientists have complained that the possibility was too readily downplayed okay so there's this dispute but then the the writer continues and it has become increasingly popular among conservative media outlets and some Republican politicians so instantly politicizing it again now this Senate uh report which is reported here as a minority staff concludes in its 30 page report 35-page report that the covid pandemic was more than likely more likely than not the result of a research related incident and then the author immediately jumps to this statement which is that conclusion stands in sharp contrast to that of other panels including from the World Health Organization and U.S intelligence agencies which have deemed a zoonotic jump more likely or remain neutral given the lack of direct evidence on the origin of the virus okay so we're being enjoined by the Journal science itself to assume that all of this discussion about the origin of the lab leak is somehow politicking okay so let's take that apart for a minute so that's predicated on the assumption that the Republicans and the conservatives let's say both narrowly and more broadly have something specific to gay pain right in a in a power related manner by advancing the claim that the origin of the virus was in some sense a lab leak and for the life of me I can't understand why that's political it's like it was either a lab leak or it wasn't that's pretty damn evident and it isn't obvious to me that the facts stand on one side of the political divider and others so then I'm wondering why in the world is it that Science magazine is publishing an article claiming that the real reason that anybody is concerned about whether or not this was a lab leak is because of Republican party Shenanigans and so what do you think about that well it's true that America is very politically polarized and there's a tendency in a much of the media to see everything in a Republican versus Democrat um lens uh these days that doesn't work for the rest of us who aren't Americans um we don't have to see the world that way we can think of it as a scientific question rather than a political question um and uh it's true that the early in the pandemic a Republican president Donald Trump uh kept saying it might have come from a lab well we happen to know that a number of scientists privately agreed with him but didn't say so at the time but the real divide here and we see this on social media all the time we get active debates about this going on the real divide is not between people who think it was a lab leak and people who think it was a market zoonosis but people who think that we haven't answered the question yet and we need to keep looking at both hypotheses what I call the open question side of the debate which I'm on which my co-authors on which everybody who thinks a lab leak is possible thinks I don't I don't know anyone who thinks it's 100 certain it was a lab League and on the other side of the question are the case closed crowd who say no no we can already rule out a lab league for certain and that seems to me immensely premature and here's why in the case of SARS we were able to rule out a lab leak and know that it came over a market because we found the infected animal we found the Civic cat that had had caught the virus from the bat and gave it to people and we found the index cases you know these were food handlers and chefs and people who were cooking civet cats you know the chain of transmission was very clear in this case we've found no infected animals we found no evidence in blood banks of previously infected people we found nobody who looks like an index case the only thing we've found is that there was a concentration of early cases in that food market in Wuhan and a number of scientists the ones referred to in that John Cohen article in science regard that evidence that there were quite a lot of early cases in that market or near that market as so-called dispositive in other words they can clear we can close the case we can go home shut up the inquiry and say we know the certain it came out of that and the rest of us say now hang on you haven't found an infected at all you haven't found an early case and by the way we know why there was a concentration of cases in that market because in the early days of the pandemic if you had pneumonia and you went to hospital they were told to consider kovid as a cause only if you lived near that market so it's a circular argument um uh of course the early cases were near the market because that's the only place they were looking it's like the drunk who says I'm looking for my uh um car keys under this street light because that's where the light is um so um you know again I'm not making the case that the market couldn't have been the place where it happened I'm making the case that we can't just definitively conclude that yet well you you're actually you're making a stronger case well you're making a stronger case than that I would say in some sense because you're saying that when we've done similar things previously we've been able to find animals who had that virus variant and we just haven't been able to find those animals at all so what you're saying is that the only evidence that it came from the market is that there are cases that were reported earlier that were associated with the market but that's the only piece of evidence that it's coming from the market and so I think it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong that you're being cautious and underplaying the evidence that suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark let's say I mean we we well it's it's slightly the evidence to be fair the evidence is slightly better than that because there were a number of samples in the market that were taken that were positive for this virus they were environmental samples that is to say door knobs countertops sewage things like that you know they weren't animals or people they were uh they were um uh they were swabs swabs taken right so we know the virus was circulating there exactly but they're all they're they're all but one of one strain of the virus which is one of the early human strains the other is the other human strain uh and there's one swab that shows that one but most of the other swabs for most of the other early cases of that one come from the other side of the river at the angsty River as it happens so it looks like one strain was certainly circulating in the market and maybe the other but it could easily have been circulating in people there's no evidence that it was animals now there's a slight concentration of those samples in one corner of the market which is where animals were on sale um so that's perhaps suggesting okay where where the toilets were and the Mahjong uh clubs were and things like that so you know there's lots of other reasons why it might have been in that corner but they tested 80 000 animals is there any evidence of animal to animal transmission of this virus well since the pandemic began uh animals like mink and deer have caught it and are transmitting it to each other so yes it is capable of transmitting in in other animals um uh but um does it do it effectively much less effectively than it does in people uh or monkeys or mice okay so that's that's a big problem right because we have these trillions of viruses and and this variant um this this covid variant doesn't transmit very well in animals and so that also makes it incumbent upon the people who claim that it had an animal origin to explain that how given that it isn't very transmissible in animals and that the probability of a human transmitted virus is very unlikely uh that puts additional constraints on the notion that this was an animal transmitted virus right because it's not very good at doing that yeah I mean remember the one thing we do know about it is that it's originally a bad virus it's these these SARS like coronavirus cybika viruses are found in horseshoe bats they're not found in other kinds of bats or other kinds of animals that's their natural Reservoir and in those bats they're not particularly lethal and they cause mainly uh intestinal disease rather than a respiratory disease and they use very different receptors so some things happened to enable that virus to adapt to uh causing a respiratory disease in human beings rather than an intestinal disease in bats now that something could have been an intermediate host like a bamboo rat or or something on sale in a market or it could have been a humanized mouse in a lab because what the Wuhan Institute of biology were doing they were infecting humanized mice now these are mice that have had the Ace II receptor Gene from human beings inserted into them in place of their own ace2 receptor so their lungs are expressing a particular protein that is only found in human beings and so if you infect an animal this mouse with the virus you're effectively testing how dangerous this virus is on human beings now the worry here is that if one of those mice escapes or if it um you know bites a lab worker or something like that we're dealing with a virus that's been trained in these mice and in human cells in the lab to infect human beings and that's the you know that's the concern with this kind of experiments the the mouse experiments were done at biosafety level three that's pretty good that's a a negative pressure cabinet uh you know completely sealed um uh where you know the air is properly filtered before it can get out but the human Airway epithelial cell culture experiments also done with the same chimeric viruses were done at biosafety level two in some cases now that's where a glove and masks sorry where gloves and a mask um uh in fact you don't even have to wear a mask at by safety level too now if this thing was you know if SARS cov2 was in one of these human Airway epithelial cell cultures um and at biosafety level two it's more likely than not that the researcher would have picked it up and might well have been asymptomatic you know it's not a very severe disease in many people and he might well have gone to the market you know he might have gone to the Mahjong club or something and so something could have happened along those lines um the the the the the you know the the contortions you have to go through to say that we can close the case on this are pretty extraordinary I mean for a start you've got to assume that the the Chinese are telling us everything we need to know about the early cases were some of the early cases lab workers the CIA says they were they won't give us the evidence as to how they know that the Chinese say they weren't the South China Morning Post reported that the earliest case was a man who caught it in uh in November the 17th 2019 well since then the official Chinese that was based on a leaked document an official Chinese have disavowed that document said no no the first case was in early December well we don't know now if this was in the West we would be all over this the media would be all over this demanding more transparency and yet the extraordinary thing is we don't hear much criticism of the Chinese regime over this we don't hear it at the G7 or um uh the the um what's called the cop 27 meeting you know uh we hear criticism of China quite rightly over their treatment of Hong Kong and the uyghurs but this to me is an even more scandalous thing that that 20 million people or nearly that may be dead and an awful lot of people have been had their lives turned upside down and we know where it started and we know there are two possible things that could have happened there and we're not doing anything to try to push back against the regime's lack of transparency and we're continuing to engage and gain of function research yes um uh and and in cities too you know I mean my co-author Alina Chan makes the point that uh we shouldn't be doing this kind of research in cities you know you should if you're going to have a lab doing this kind of work at all it should be in an isolated area yeah like Mars like Greenland or Mars yeah yeah yeah um um you know we don't do um we don't cite nuclear power stations in the middle of cities um why should we cite virology labs in the middle of cities it's exactly the same argument uh Nick you know I I follow genomics molecular biology um uh uh pathology quite closely as a writer not as a practitioner and yet I didn't know that these experiments were being done and when I first heard the argument that it might have come from a lab I said no no we're not nearly clever enough to design a virus this good um well once I found out what we were doing or what they were doing and how it goes completely against the the rules that biotechnology set itself in the 1970s saying look let's let's do this kind of work but not on dangerous pathogenic viruses because that could be dangerous I was really shocked by how how far into the manipulation and testing of dangerous viruses we have gone in the last 10 years well so I guess part of the reaction might be because I'm trying to understand why there would be motivation to shut down let's say speculation investigation into the possibility of a lab leak and I guess maybe part of the reason is that it reveals a reality that in some sense is too Dreadful to conveniently comprehend and we we have a lot of problems like that confronting us at the moment to apocalyptic problems of one variety of another and the problem here is that we're we're doing um potentially we're stupidly doing potentially dangerous things on a scale that can produce exactly the kind of result that perhaps has already been produced and uh it'd be easier in some sense in the short term just to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening then you could add the complication there that well we don't want to upset whatever International Harmony we've managed to establish with the Chinese but and and I can understand why people would be loath to reinvestigate that problem too because we we have an Associated problem here so we're we're engaged with the Chinese in in a multitude of different ways and to some degree that's very beneficial I mean there are far fewer Chinese people facing acute privation than there were say a few decades ago and the Chinese have been relatively successfully integrated into the world economy and we have all of the cheap and desirable Goods that the Chinese are producing and all of that seems a lot more positive than you know two antagonistic populations facing each other in a state of absolute economic privation but we also have another problem which is while the Chinese are pretty damn authoritarian and they're still run by the Communist party which is a dreadful organization and and then we don't know how much our entanglement with the Chinese tilts us towards that totalitarian structure and so one of the things I've been noting is that when the pandemic emerged the totalitarians acted first and they acted in a totalitarian way which is well why don't we just lock everyone down which is sort of the totalitarian answer to everything and then in our herd-like panic in the west we immediately imitated them and so that's the spread of a pathogen too right that's the spread of a totalitarian pathogen of ideas and that's also shook us up terribly in the west it isn't obvious to me at all that the lockdowns were we're the least bit justifiable they certainly were justifiable ethically as far as I'm concerned and it isn't obvious to me at all that they were justifiable practically and so we have a pathogen of of covid to contend with but we also have a pathogen of totalitarian totalitarianism to contend with and I would say the latter poses a much bigger threat than the former lest we keep mucking about with gain of function research yeah well um you're absolutely right that um a lot of the uh proponents of lockdown in the early days uh were very explicit about saying we'd never have contemplated this policy if we hadn't seen it work in Wuhan there was a deliberate work yes exactly well it worked for a while and then it didn't work and so on um and um so there was a very explicit sort of China Envy going on but I think you know I completely agree with you that that uh you know China's transformation in the last 50 years has been Spectacular from one of the poorest Nations on Earth to to a middle-income country lifting more people out of uh poverty than has happened in any generation uh in in tens of thousands of years that's magnificent and it was done by Liberation it was done by Deng xiaop Bing's policy of economic Liberation you can start a business you can um be a you can make money you can uh you know trade you can do all these things um as long as you don't set up a rival to the Communist Party there was economic Liberation but not political Liberation that was continued under his successor particularly under who Jin Tao and very successful it was too it took a long time for us to realize and certainly for me to realize that Xi Jinping is not like that right he is not sticking to that policy at all he has completely abandoned any idea of free enterprise um for ordinary Chinese people and gone to a completely State directed view of the economy as well as society and a police state of the most brutal kind and that does change the the calculation can I just tell you one little story in respect of that about the Soviet Union that I think is quite interesting here because people often say to me look we'll never know because the Chinese are not going to let us find out what happened in Wuhan in in the Autumn of 2019 so why bother speculating well in swedlovsk in the Soviet Union in 1979 there was some kind of industrial accident and 65 people died of what the American intelligence Community said was Anthrax poisoning as a result of a leak from a bio Warfare plot the Russians said no it's not a bio Warfare plant no they weren't handy Anthrax no that's not what happened they got food poisoning you're wrong the Russians invited in an International Panel of scientists to investigate led by a Nobel Prize winner a wonderful guy called Matt mezelson and after looking around and visiting sweat loss now called a katarinburg but it was then called swedlask they um concluded that the Russians were right the Americans were wrong this was not an Anthrax League and uh case closed and the International Community was satisfied then the Soviet Union collapsed and scientists who had worked in the biowarfare plant because that's what it was in swedlovsk came to the west and told us exactly what had happened on that day one shift had taken off a filter to repair it and had not put it back on they hadn't told the next shift at what they'd done and as a result of plume of Anthrax spores was sent over the city of swedlask killing 65 people if it had gone the other way it would have killed hundreds of thousands um because it went over a relatively unpopulated suburb um so it took the best part of a decade before the truth came out and the the LIE had survived an international investigation but the truth did eventually come out in that case yeah so the moral of that story is that not only do these things happen but that they can be covered up quite effectively although in that case not not finally and perhaps not in this case and so um I think it's it's so do you do you accept the the the psychological hypothesis let's say of convenience in some sense this hoping that An Inconvenient Truth will go away as motive for those who are attempting to make the case that the Assumption of a leak is just politicization or or do you think what else is going on here um well the there's there's also a sort of priesthood aspect to it um virologists have been talking to each other and living in their own world for a while and they've now got scruffy people like journalists and uh people on the internet and people who've done a little bit of research coming along and invading their space and saying I want answers to questions and they find that impertinent they find that annoying and uh they it it it it's sort of um you know uh it it's sort of beneath them to have to answer questions from these people so there's a that's an another motivation a third motivation is that there was a lot of there was a big build up behind the idea that the reason we had a pandemic was because we're interfering with uh Mother Nature we're encroaching on habitats of bats and things like that they wanted it to be an ecological cautionary tale and so there's a reluctance to have it teach a very different um cautionary tale instead um so there's a whole slew of motivations that are causing establishment science to behave a bit like a priesthood here I mean there's also Financial remember there's big money in virology research and uh you know a lot of scientists spend a lot of their time thinking about where's the next million dollars going to come from to support my lab quite rightly it's it's very competitive world and that they fear that if the world concludes that uh high-risk virology research led to this accident that there will be no more funding for high-risk virology research you are not you or I might think that's a good thing but it genuinely affects these people's livelihoods so no wonder they're going to fight their corner it's also a complicated thing I mean I am an uh an advocate of an admirer let's say for what it's worth of open inquiry and it isn't obvious to me that it's certainly not a simple thing a simple matter to conclude that there's an area of Investigation that's now permanently off limits and then there's always the danger that deciding that that area of scientific air inquiries permanently off limits leads to the spread of areas that are permanently off limits and that becomes politicized which it would instantaneously so I know already that there is politicking taking place on the genetic database front such that those who are investigating such heresies as the heritability of intelligence the multi-factorial heritage ability of intelligence are having a very difficult time getting access to the previously publicly accessible databases that made such investigation possible and so being concerned about arbitrary restrictions being placed on the domain of scientific inquiry by well-meaning politicians is definitely something to be concerned about so this is a very complicated problem I mean do you think it's even possible to to conclude let's say that well maybe gain of function research is like an exception to the rule we're not going to fund a lot of random experimentation on the new development of atomic weapons in the middle of cities and we shouldn't be doing we should be doing we should be equally cautious with regards to gain and function research in relationship to viruses but then you know can we constrain the constraints themselves so they don't interfere with the scientific process and that doesn't the answer to that certainly doesn't seem to be obvious well the the sheer lack of curiosity about investigating this question has shocked me um I approached the Royal Society I knew some uh senior people at the Royal Society and I approached them and said look this is developing into a very interesting debate lots of interesting evidence has been put forward on the lab League side and lots on the market side don't you think it would be a good subject for a set-piece debate at the Royal Society with some experts doesn't have to be me I'm not necessarily pushing myself forward um to talk about this and uh they said oh no we only discuss scientific topics as if this was a political topic right right so I approached the the the Academy of Medical Sciences uh and I got roughly the same answer oh it's too controversial well you know I'm sorry a new virus has erupted into the human species forming causing the worst pandemic in several hundred years killing close on 20 million people as far as we can make out totally turning upside down the world economy and we don't want to investigate how it happened and whether it'll happen again I'm sorry but I find that bizarre well and we also insist that all such investigations are nothing but politicking which is also a sign on a broader sense of the what of the almost Universal acceptance of certain post-modern dictums right that there's no science without politics let's say which is um well a problematic claim let's say to say the least on that I mean I you know I I I I I I I'm in a practicing scientist for 30 40 years but uh most of what I did had no political Edge to it now when I open the journals I find pretty well every article even you know scientific papers seem to have to um nudge their conclusions towards some sort of quasi-political um issue you know whether it's climate change or economic inequality or whatever rather than just saying here's what I found and uh I don't know what it means if you see what I mean I actually went for completely different reasons I was doing some digging into the scientific literature about um what happened at the end of the ice age in the UK you know when the ice melted I I it wasn't because I those interested in modern climate change or anything like that I just I just wanted to know you know when did the Ice disappear from different parts of of Britain and what did the landscape look like at the time and how long did it take for vegetation to appear you know is this was uh you know there's no particular reason for doing this but this just intrigued me one day and I spent a few days uh digging into the the scientific papers and I found a very interesting pattern which was that any paper published in the last seven or eight years um was sort of political it had this sort of angle to it and either it wanted to use the information that it was digging up about the ice age to tell a moral story about today's climate change or something um uh or it it was sort of interested in a kind of political argument between two factions in science and and I had to go back to the 1990s where I found some very refreshingly good papers that were saying things like well here's what we think happened and and here's a map of what we think happened and and I don't agree with Fred who thinks something else you know and I just suddenly had a moment where I thought hang on are we losing the enlightenment view of science where we were inquiry on its own is good do you have a coffee lover on your holiday shopping list Black Rifle has all the best Brewing gear thermoses mugs and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee Black Rifle sources the most exotic roasts from around the globe all coffee is roasted here in the U.S by veteran-led teams of coffee experts stuff your Christmas 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might describe as the postmodern critique which has a Marxist Edge to it for reasons we could get into is has definitely made itself manifest um on the scientific front right and that the claim of the postmodernists in some real sense is that there never was any science without politicking and that science itself is a political Enterprise and If you deny that and usually conducted on behalf of those whose who have the current power and that if you deny that that's only an indication of the degree to which you're captured by The Narrative of power it's something like that and there's no doubt that that's had an unbelievably corrosive effect on the scientific endeavor in the social sciences and also in on the philosophic Endeavor on the humanities front and I saw years ago that this was eventually going to be aimed at the the stem types the science technology engineering and Mathematics types and at that point nobody believed that was a possibility but I saw it as a certainty and I thought that the postmodernists would go through the scientists like a hot knife through butter and and that made me ask myself you know what are the preconditions for the scientific Enterprise because we shouldn't be thinking as scientists that being able to think scientifically or being allowed or encouraged to think scientifically is something like a deep Norm in fact it's exactly the opposite right it's it's it's an unbelievable exception and it only emerged in the domain of human cognitive Endeavor once in history and that was say 500 years ago and it's had its run in some real sense and made us technologically powerful but it's a it's it's reasonable to view it as a very fragile Enterprise the preconditions for which we don't understand and so let me outline a precondition and you tell me what you think about this so I've been very interested in the Nietzsche and idea of the death of God right the and the Nietzsche believed like Dostoevsky that once our faith in a Transcendent being collapsed that the political in some sense would immediately become religious and or that nihilism would Prevail those were the basic two outcomes and both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky took that farther they also prophesied that not only would the political become sacred as it took the place of this of what was sacred but that there would be a particular kind of political Endeavor that would become sacred and that would be the Endeavor that eventually manifested itself as in the Communist ethos and that all came true with a Vengeance and then but I was wondering more recently the the judeo-christian claim and this is the monotheistic claim is that there's a Transcendent spirit to which we must pledge allegiance so we must worship and celebrate let's say that we must mimic and uh that constitutes the basis of the religious Enterprise but then there's an analogous claim which I think is derived from that claim that there's a Transcendent object that whose fundamental nature escapes our apprehension and that pursuit of a relationship with that Transcendent object is the proper activity of the scientist and so that would be the scientist who always assumes that his epistemology that his theories are incomplete that something real and comprehensible lies outside the domain of that theory and that attempting to make contact with that Transcendent domain is actually the proper mode of conduct for a scientist and I can't help but see that as both deeply analogous to and maybe even a derivation of that more fundamental religious orientation and so then I've been wondering more recently is that if the death of God so to speak also although surprisingly will mean the demise of the Enlightenment Enterprise because it was predicated on an unconscious religiosity that presumed the existence of a Transcendent object and and the possibility of a beneficial relationship between the Inquirer the scientist and that object itself and so well I know that brings us somewhat far afield with regard to our discussion of covet but but yeah but no no that's fascinating and and um I'm gonna pick up on a couple of points and may forget to address some of the very interesting points you just made um the first thing to say is that like you it don't I mean not as soon but it eventually dawned on me that uh that the postmodern Revolution was gonna consume not just the soft Sciences the human and Humanities but hard science is too and I remember realizing that there was a sort of you know anthropology department 20 years ago had a sort of lying down the middle of the corridor in each department in each University on one side were rational people who looked at bones or did ethnography or something and on the other side were people who were very politicized uh very post-modern very meta in their approach and these two tribes were or at each other's throats in anthropology now um that then happened to psychology it happened to quite a lot of other sciences and and you know those of us who thought well it'll never happen to maths um well I'm afraid mathematics is already being challenged you know is it is it sufficiently feminist is it sufficiently um uh non-white you know all these sort of things are trying to dismantle um what seems to me are completely objective um discipline um at the same time now how far it'll go I don't know I like you and like that other Great Canadian Stephen Pinker I'm really worried about the fragility of the Enlightenment philosophy um I think the sort of high point of people like Richard Feynman and Francis Crick saying uh wonderfully uh open-minded and skeptical things about everything and as a result uh challenging each other to find out things about the world um looks a little to me like it's harder to do these days and it's as if I've I've living through the period at the end of the the Roman Republic when the tremendous open-mindedness of people like lucretius and others like that got swept away in the the uh the book burning and idea suppressing stuff that came frankly with Christianity um uh and so unless I'm less sympathetic than you I suspect to the role of religion here I don't think religion was a friend of of open inquiry into um Mysteries of the world um uh and well we should maybe maybe let's let let me let me let me differentiate two sub categories in relationship to that I've talked a lot to people like Sam Harris and to Richard Dawkins about exactly these issues say about the antagonism between religion and Science and so one of the things that I really saw so Dawkins regards the religious Enterprise as pseudoscientifics all that that body of pseudoscientific proclamation that impedes the the rational progress of Enlightenment science and so that's his perspective and and I'm not trying to parody it or to put it down in any sense I'm just trying to relate it and whereas Harris and I'm using these two people because they're examples for perhaps of the world's most famous atheists Harris's argument is is more it's more emotional than that in some sense uh and I don't mean irrational I mean based in a deeper emotion Harris identifies the spirit of totalitarianism and malevolence with the religious Enterprise he and I think that's an error because he's throwing out the baby with the bath water what's interesting to me in relationship well so I would say you you're talking about the antagonism between religion and science But but so one of the things I really admired about Dawkins and his work has been quite helpful to me by the way is that he has this clear-headed faith in science this in rationality that's typical of the best scientists Perhaps Perhaps someone like Feynman for example and but Dawkins like all true scientists believes that there is a Transcendent truth and that the pursuit of that truth will set us free and it's those claims that I think are essentially religious and so I think it's useful to differentiate between the religious impulse towards truth if if you can call out the religious impulse and the and the totalitarian aspect of the imposition of religious Dogma which I see actually as a variant not of the religious spirit but of the totalitarian spirit because I I do believe the greatest scientists that I've known have a religious reverence for truth now they they say objective truth and that's that's fine it's perfectly reasonable variant of truth but the reverence itself doesn't seem to me to be scientific it's predicated on whatever it is that drives reverence and I'm afraid that what's happening at the level of the postmodern critique is that it's it's actually a corrosive critique of that reverence itself it's the claim that that reverence is nothing but a mask for Power claims for example and that man that is a corrosive criticism and it might be corrosive enough to bring the whole damn Enterprise to a halt and I see it shuddering forward with the corruption of journals like Nature and Science and and the increasing politicization of every scientific discussion and I I I I I I I'm with both you and Dawkins there and the sense that I like him have got this reverence for Science and truth and somewhat skeptical of whether religion shares that because I think faith is antithetical to it but he is perhaps wrong that the enemy is conventional religion because actually creeping up on us has been a much more dangerous anti-enlightenment Force as you say the the postmodernism and um uh thing a lot of other things that go with it and totalitarianism exactly and I you know I think the the the the critique you can make of atheists like me um very validly is that when we throw out the baby um sorry the bath water the baby goes to and we end up with something far worse well that's that's the issue the The Cult of Stalin or the or the cult of fouca or whatever it might be you know um and uh so it in that sense and you know actually Richard concedes this that if you're gonna have if you can't exterpate uh Faith from the human spirit then you might as well have a mild version of it called The Church of England oh okay let me push let me push you a little bit on that too because I'm very curious about this issue of the faith predicated presumption of the properly functioning scientists so um it seems to me so imagine that and you tell me if you think I've got any of these presuppositions wrong because they're they're they're crucially important to this argument so the first is the belief in the existence of a Transcendent object and I would say that's a faith-based belief and here's why so you have a scientific theory and you can't help but look at the world of objects through that theory so when you see the world of objects in your discipline that that Vision that perception is informed by your epistemology but you know as a scientist that you're wrong but the knowledge that you're wrong is predicated on an assumption and the assumption is that there is a domain of information that as yet that exists as yet outside your presuppositions and that has to be a faith-based Axiom because given that that source of information exists beyond your current set of axioms you can't encounter it you have to just accept it as a continuing reality and it would be the reality of that knowledge that currently lies Beyond us well I see I certainly I certainly think that um uh the purpose of science is to find new Mysteries it's not just to solve them because in solving one you always come upon more you know in finding out that we're just a uh a marble a Blue Marble spinning through space we then find there are things like Suns and galaxies and black holes and things Each of which is a new mystery that that we have to address and I love that aspect about science that you know the more trees we chop down in the clearing of knowledge the more Forest comes into view as it were the more stuff we don't know and don't understand and I think it's it's worth reminding ourselves that you know what what gets scientists up in the morning in a lab is not the things they know already you put them on the shelf and feed them to the students it's the things you don't yet know it's the the part of the puzzle you haven't yet found out and we mustn't lose that well and you would you you did refer to that and I think this is extremely interesting you referred to that as a love and that's not that's not that's not an objective observation in some sense right it's a reference to a particular kind of motivation and so but then let's say we could look we can inquire into that a little bit more deeply we might say well what's that love predicated on and one possible sources that while you see that it engages you in a meaningful Enterprise right so there's a sense of implicit meaning in this search to make contact with that which still lies Beyond you and so that's engaging and and it's deeply engaging it's part of the Instinct of meaning as as far as I'm concerned but it's also predicated on the idea and I I can't help but think that this is fundamentally a religious Axiom and I think it's a judeo-christian derived religious Axiom which is that you also believe that the truth will set you free and in some sense Matt our whole bloody discussion today centers on that right I mean you're delving into the covid-19 mystery because you are making a presumption here against those who would take the pathway of convenience and deceit let's say that no you don't get to do that I don't care what your rationales are something actually happened in Wuhan and we the reason we need to find out what it is is because finding out what is true is actually the best pathway forward regardless of your bloody political preconceptions and I can't see sin this is a genuine question to you I don't see that as anything different than a reference to the work to the idea for example that the Divine word of or that the word of Truth itself is divine and that the the manifestation of that truth is in fact freeing and I I don't think that's how within science claim I no I'm completely happy with that um I can give you some very dull practical reasons why we need to find out how the pandemic started so that we can predict where the next one's coming from so that we can deter bioterrorists and Bad actors who might be thinking of copying what happened etc etc but those aren't my real motivation my real motivation is because I think truth matters more than anything else there's a wonderful quote somebody gave me the other day which he said was from solgenitsin but I don't think it is I'd like to know who said it truth matters more than consequence you know right right right don't want us to know what happened or worried about the consequence of finding out what happened but I'm sorry the truth comes first we have to deal with the consequences of finding out the truth but the truth is what I really care about and I I do think in a sense it'll set me free and you free and all of us yeah um it may be uncomfortable just as finding out that we're you know we're not at the center of the universe we're not a unique creature we have the same genes as others uh we're 40 genetically the same as the banana you know these are all humiliating things science has found but they're they're not uh but for me they're liberating as well well and you you made a very strong argument there on the consequence front so because look here's the totalitarian presumption in it essentially is that well we have a political Theory so let's say it's Marxism in this case and we bloody well know it's right and so because we already have the truth at hand then all of our endeavors should be devoted towards the promotion of that truth and it's a final truth and we have it at hand there's no Transcendent truth there apart from the doctrine itself now your proposition and I think this is the proposition of true scientists is no no you have to abandon your political presumptions completely and that means that you have to face even those truths that make you tremendously uncomfortable cognitively and emotionally in the moment you cannot use that discomfort as evidence you have to assume regardless of such evidence strangely enough that in the final analysis All Things Considered there's nothing that's more liberating than the truth and I Matt I think that that's the core doc I do believe that's the core Doctrine upon which judeo-christian Society itself is found it because the the doctrine of the Divine word is something like this as far as I've been able to tell it's something like the proper action of the Consciousness that liberates us is the forthright confrontation with the with possibility itself with potential itself and the the willingness to confront that head-on in truth and the consequence of that confrontation is the construction of the habitable world that is good that that seems to me to be the doctrine of the word at the beginning of Genesis and there's a notion there that human beings men and women alike are made in that image and I suppose you could argue about my theological interpretation but but that does seem to be the doctrine yeah I'm no Theologian but I think what you're describing and this is perhaps where I do differ from you is Judea Christian philosophy as tamed or refracted by the enlightenment uh by Spinoza and Descartes well and by the Greeks well no but I think I think the problem you know I think if you go back and look at the early history of the church it was a a brutally nihilistic cult that stamped out a lot of openness that came from the Greeks and so I don't think I I you know I I I don't think that that it was as harmless for its first thousand first fifteen hundred years as as Bishops and Priests like to tell us now in that sense I think it was like the modern Communist party which in China says the party matters most Xi Jinping is right about everything you must see everything through the lens of how you can help to further our aims which is a you know a deeply unimaginative way of seeing the world I think a lot of modern Islam is like that and I think quite a lot of you know the most fanatical parts of Christianity are like that um uh and I think Christianity was like that for most of its first 1500 years or at least in in bursts it was and then it it came to terms with the wonderful ideas of the Enlightenment and I I I just want to introduce another word here that I think is very important and that word is wonder I do love the wonder that I get from a deep understanding of I don't know deep geological time or the scale of the universe or where a virus came from or whatever it it's it's wonderful in the literal meaning of the word and I don't feel that real that Christianity or religion generally has a monopoly on that wonder I think Richard Dawkins has made a very good point here that unweaving the rainbow um finding out what a rainbow is made of has not made it less wonderful it's made it more so and Keats was wrong about that well that that I agree with with that by the way I also think and this is why we have to be very careful about our use of terminology is that I would say that the uh the the negative religious phenomena that you're describing are a manifestation not of the religious spirit but of the totalitarian spirit and that those are often conflated okay and then I would say that and to put this into a deeper context that sense of wonder that you described I don't think that there is any difference between that and proper worship because I think attending to The Wonder of being is the fundamental religious act in some real sense and there are preconditions for that and one of them is a an epistemic humility right you have to allow yourself to to apprehend that which is beyond and that is an instinct and I think it's part of the Instinct that drives love itself and so I would be very interested for example in the psychophysiology of awe and that's associated with Wonder and so one of the things that's extraordinarily interesting about awe is that it involves pilo erection and so I know when you see a cat puff itself up um in a burst of fur when it sees a giant Predator it's it's pilo erection it's driving that and when you get those chills up and down your back and maybe your hair stands on end it's that same apprehension of of you could think about a predator as an unsolved mystery to to an animal we we use that same framework of Wonder and awe to apprehend the unknown itself and we've learned to contend with the unknown as as a potential Predator obviously but also as a potential source of redemption and that I would say being Guided by that sense of wonder which is humility predicated and driven by a desire to pursue the truth that is the manifestation of the most fundamental religious Instinct and I think that needs to be differentiated from religion as a dogmatic structure which can degenerate towards totalitarianism like any other human endeavor and does right and we have to be on the on the watch for that but we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater yeah that distinction between religion as a an institution and religion as a a a a a a psychology and epistemology is is vital and one that I see in science now too I keep saying right right uh science science is is a fantastic human achievement um I think it's the greatest human achievement you know the knowledge that we've acquired of the world is to me more important than uh music poetry art Etc no that marks me out as a bit of a Philistine Affair but it's what I think but that doesn't make me a fan of science as an institution increasingly I'm disinfect disaffected with it um with the way that it it turns into a cult the way it it it it it it it behaves in a self-interested way the way it turns its back on knowledge uh um and I think there's a real problem with science as an institution but not a problem with science as a philosophy well well I okay so I want to make a differentiation there too because you talked about science and your admiration for science in part as an admiration for the body of knowledge that's been generated and and I can understand the utility of that because that delivers for us our Tech our technological and pragmatic uh uh capability let's say but but I don't think that by your own testimony so to speak that that is what you admire most about the scientific Enterprise because you said to me that you spoke to me about your love of inquiry and it seems to me you could distinguish science as a practice from science as a body of knowledge and you could say well that the attempt to put forward that body of knowledge can degenerate into a totalitarian Enterprise or become corrupted by political matters but so let's just parse that off for a second we could say this is this is worth thinking about in relationship to what universities do is that when you're training a scientist you're not stuffing someone's head full of scientific facts not primarily although you may also be doing that what you're doing is training a certain you're training an adherence to a certain Spirit of inquiry and then I would say that the great achievement of the scientific Enlightenment is not the production of that body of knowledge even though that's admirable in and of itself it's the training and fostering of a spirit of inquiry that's passed forward from from uh let's say PhD supervisor to student in the entire scientific Enterprise and that the yeah the most valid okay okay so so so and then I would say it isn't obvious to me that true those who pursue a genuine religious or alternative creative path are distinguishable in some sense in their ethical orientation from genuine scientists it's the same spirit it's a spirit of humility it's a spirit of pursuit of truth it's us it's a desire for relationship with the Transcendent I know that's viewed differently by scientists because of their emphasis on the object but it isn't obvious what the Transcendent object is I mean um it gets less obvious as we investigated in some real sense and so I'm afraid that that this battle and you already made made allusions to this this continuing battle between those who profess religious belief in the most fundamental sense and those who profess scientific belief is blinding us to the fact that there's an Enterprise afoot that will bring both down absolutely I think that's extremely well put and just just back to to your uh the the point you made about uh how it's not the body of knowledge it's the method of inquiry that turns me on as it were philosophically um psychologically at least um I had a very Vivid experience first term at University new book published by one of the professors that was about to teach me it turned out his name was Richard Dawkins the book was called The Selfish Gene and that sent those hairs up on the back of my neck reading it because it was the first science book I'd read that didn't say here's the answer to the question it said here's a question and I don't know the answer but I'm going to take you on a journey to try and understand my way of framing this this this mystery and it was suddenly it was like being shown the edge of the world it was like being shown you know the the opening up of the Mysteries was was so important uh that he the in the early pages of that book that he does very very beautifully um and so I I think you're absolutely right there was something almost religious in the way that the famous atheist Richard Dawkins came across to me in those in those early days yeah well you know I've met Dawkins a number of times and and as I said his thinking has had quite a lot of influence on on the way I think in in many many ways and I I can't help but admire him and it's an interesting thing because I I believe that his his insistence that the religious Enterprise is nothing but a superstitious uh impediment to the clear progress of science I think that that's insufficiently differentiated because it doesn't differentiate Spirit from from from totalitarianism it conflates them and and the totalitarian spirit is subtle enough so that identifying it with a given domain of endeavor let's say the religious is a dangerous understatement of the true danger of that ethos because it can permeate everything and is likely to and so if we put the enemy in the wrong place so if the scientific types for example assume that its manifestation of the religious spirit that's the primarily and primary impediment to the scientific Endeavor then we're going to be fighting the wrong War and we're going to make enemies out of people who should be allies I think that's a key point I completely agree with you on that all right well so let let me recap because we're running out of we're running out of time and so we've we've been delving into the origin of the covid virus and and we've also been trying to answer the question well why should we why is this not merely a political Enterprise and even more deeply than that why should we care beyond the mere practicalities of specifying the the the origin and there are obvious practical reasons to specify the origin because if it was a lab leak then well maybe we should be doing gain of function research in labs in cities or maybe not in totalitarian countries for that matter certainly not with Western Aid and those are all relevant questions but then we also addressed a deeper question which is well is this investigation into the origin of the covid virus not also an Exemplar of faith in the pursuit of the truth itself regardless of short-term and convenient political considerations and is it not also an expression of the idea that there is a Pursuit that whose value transcends that of any set of short-term or even medium-term political considerations and so that's really where we that's what we investigated at the end of the conversation and so um that's a summary for everyone watching and listening it's been very helpful to me actually to have this conversation to to clarify that point that you know my motivation and and I believe the motivation the world should have to answering this question uh is not as practical but is in some sense um uh you know predicated on the Transcendent importance of truth right right right well right and you know I mean I do believe that the West at its best and that would be the West insofar as the West has been has carried the beacon of of freedom and human dignity and of course we faltered in that many ways that at its best the West acts out that claim that the truth will set you free and we've done that on the religious front when we've been properly religious and we've done it on the scientific front when we've been properly scientific and we lose that fundamental Faith at our immense Peril unless we're willing to believe that human engineered deceit which is not a bad definition of totalitarianism is is it desire or nihilism itself as belief in everything collapses we don't want to do we want a world where we accept either of those Alternatives or their Dreadful marriage let's say as the alternative and this is a decision that we're all making not least those of us who are scientists and so the scientists who are listening I would also say you great scientists or not so great even you bend the truth to political purposes not only at your own great Peril as practicing scientists and as human beings but you also warp the entire structure of the world and that is an an absolute abdication of the opportunities that have been granted to you by a society that strived for hundreds of years to give you the privilege of engaging in this pursuit of the truth couldn't put it better myself all right well to everyone who's watching and listening I'm going to talk to to Matt for another half an hour as I do always with my guests on The Daily wire plus platform and we're going to talk about well I think what we're probably going to talk about is how that Spirit of Wonder made itself manifest in Dr Ridley's life and how following the manifestation of that Spirit informed the development of his extraordinarily interesting and successful career hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,356,402

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: FEh5JyZC218

Length: 112min 35sec (6755 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022

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[u/RichardtheGingerBoss]

"we also have a pathogen of totalitarianism to contend with"

[u/Suecotero]

Why in the everloving fuck would you invite a psychologist who nearly medicated himself to death to talk about virology and politics?

Just because JP looks tired/bearded and has the capacity to sound 100% confident about any topic he rents his face for doesn't mean he actually has anything of value to say. Great way to delegitimize an entire video.

[u/Darth_Barleycorn]

I really tried with Peterson. His work as a psychologist is still top notch and even his contra-wokism stuff is occasionally necessary. But ffs please stay in your lanes and stfu about shit you don’t know about. The fame went to his head and he won’t stop. This is like Bret Weinstein promoting ivermectin.