Back in 2021 Matt Ridley teamed up with Alina Chan to publish a book promoting the lab leak conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. (See my summary of a review here.)
Yesterday (March 25, 2025) Michael Shermer interviewed Matt Ridley on The Michael Shermer Show podcast. The reason for the interview was to promote Ridley's new book Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea but Shermer started off the interview by asking about Ridley's previous book with Alina Chan. At 2 mins he asks,
Before we get into the new book, do you want to take a victory lap for your previous book. I mean the lab leak hypothesis is looking more and more like you called it years ago.
It's all downhill from there. I have lost all respect for Michael Shermer. It's a shame that this podcast is hosted on the Skeptic magazine website.
7 comments :
I'm way ahead of you: I never had a lot of respect for Shermer.
It's like watching a couple creationists clapping each other on the back and meanwhile kvetching about how they are being treated badly by the mainstream. I don’t care about either of these people, but I am saddened about a couple academic friends of mine who also keep falling into the lab leak rabbit hole. It’s weird, bc one should think they would know better.
I don't know about Ridley's book on sexual selection, but from this recording it seems similar to the claim of Richard Prum who published a book arguing that Darwin was right about the subject- that animals (seen in females especially) have a sense of beauty. I had gotten about ½ way through that book and gave it up. There was nothing there. Prum, and apparently Ridley (and Darwin) are entirely basing their view on vertebrates, and especially on birds. This is meanwhile IGNORING the majority of species that perform intersexual selection, which are the invertebrates. There, we see the same sort of displays and calls in crustaceans, spiders, and insects. Have a look at a peacock spider. In what way could a female peacock spider, with a brain that would be lost on a pin-head, possibly have a sense of beauty?
At any rate, I don't see how a sense of beauty explains anything. How did the animal get such a sense? This seems nothing more than a way of describing female preference. Presumably it's adaptive in some way and needs an evolutionary explanation. What causes them to find some males more beautiful than others?
i don't have a bone in this but share curiosity. Can someone tell me how the lab leak idea was so called debunked? I watched the linked article and all it said was that it could also be natural.. but nothing that actually debunked the idea that it could not come from a lab.
@Anonymous: You can't debunk a conspiracy theory and you can't prove a negative (e.g. that the virus could NOT have come from a lab).
All you can do is demonstrate the total lack of evidence for the lab leak conspiracy theory and point out that it requires an extremely improbable scenario; namely that a huge number of otherwise respected scientists must be lying.
In addition, you can show that the alternative - a natural origin - is supported by abundant direct and circumstantial evidence and that it's consistent with the origin of other pandemics.
Reasonable people shouldn't have much difficulty choosing between those two possibilities.
I don't think you improbable scenario is true .. all it takes is one person in that Wuhan lab to not follow proper safety protocols and then get infected and then go home and cough around some people. A lab leak doesn't have to mean it was intentional, but that it's source could be the lab.
@Anonymous Your speculation requires that there was live SAR-CoV-2 virus in the WIV in the Fall of 2019. Do have even a shred of evidence to support that assumption?
If not, then why are you still defending the lab leak conspiracy theory?
The lab has blood samples from all the workers at WIV. None of them tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. How do you explain that?
It looks to me like you are going out of your way to promote the lab leak conspiracy theory as a distinct probability in spite of any evidence. Why?
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