The Review: What social epistemology can teach us about the lab-leak debates

Plus: Spiders! ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Last week, the Broad Institute molecular biologist Alina Chan laid out a five-prong [argument]( in The New York Times for why Covid most likely leaked from a laboratory. She opened with what might be called the Jon Stewart theory, after Stewart’s taboo-breaking appearance on the Colbert Report in 2021, in which he [scandalized]( Stephen Colbert by coming out as a lab-leak believer — at the time a fringe position. “There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China,” said Stewart. “Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab!” Chan likewise matter-of-factly begins by observing that “the SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.” Chan’s second piece of evidence is that, in 2018, the Wuhan lab had “proposed creating viruses with SARS-CoV-2’s defining feature” to U.S. partners. Although that proposal failed to secure U.S. funding, Anthony Fauci told Congress last week that the lab could have done the work on its own. Third: The Wuhan lab suffered from “low biosafety conditions.” Fourth, despite the confidence of its early champions, “the hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.” (Stewart, more colorfully: “How did this happen? Hmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle? ... Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have corona.”) Fifth and finally, various kinds of evidence confirming an animal origin have, in the case of Covid, failed to emerge as they did for earlier disease outbreaks, such as SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Chan has prominent allies, like the virologist Richard Ebright, and prominent opponents, like Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of a 2022 [article]( in Science that purported to show that the Huanan Seafood Market was the definitive origin of the outbreak. How is a non-expert to decide? In a classic 2001 paper titled “[Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?]( the philosopher Alvin I. Goldman takes a close look at the mechanisms non-experts use to adjudicate competing expert claims. Goldman’s essay probably won’t help you decide whether Covid came from a lab or not, but it will elucidate the tools you use to figure out whom to believe and whom to doubt. Although the modern world is more comprehensively dependent on domains of expert knowledge than at any previous period in history, there’s nothing new about the basic problem, as Goldman observes. It comes up, for instance, in Plato’s Charmides, in which “Socrates asks whether a man is able to examine another man who claims to know something to see whether he does or not; Socrates wonders whether a man can distinguish someone who pretends to be a doctor from someone who really and truly is one.” In the philosophical literature, this came to be called the “novice/expert problem,” which encompasses both the problem of determining who is really an expert and of determining whether an expert is speaking accurately. We all confront versions of these questions every day, for instance when we worry, but have no way of confirming, that an auto mechanic has exaggerated the number of repairs required to get our car back on the road. Goldman’s major focus is on a variant of the novice/expert problem that is exactly the one before us when it comes to the lab-leak hypothesis: “Can novices, while remaining novices, make justified judgments about the relative credibility of rival experts?” (He calls this the “novice/2-expert problem.”) He is not interested in cases in which a novice can acquire sufficient expertise to make an expert judgment himself. “I assume that some sorts of limiting factors — whether they be time, cost, ability, or what have you — will keep our novices from becoming experts, at least prior to the time by which they need to make their judgment.” Modern science offers fertile terrain for the exploration of this problem, because the highly specialized and technical nature of any given area means that even credentialed experts in one field might be relative novices in another nearby field. Goldman lists five kinds of evidence that a novice can use to adjudicate competing expert claims. Probably none will come as a surprise: (A) Arguments presented by the contending experts to support their own views and critique their rivals’ views. (B) Agreement from additional putative experts on one side or other of the subject in question. (C) Appraisals by “meta-experts” of the experts’ expertise (including appraisals reflected in formal credentials earned by the experts). (D) Evidence of the experts’ interests and biases vis-à -vis the question at issue. (E) Evidence of the experts’ past “track-records.” (A) is the thorniest by far of these five sources, because it requires novices to evaluate expert arguments — a task for which they are, as novices, definitionally under-qualified. In some cases, Goldman says, they may be entirely unqualified, not just novices but “ignoramuses.” Most of us are in more or less that situation when it comes to deciding between, say, Chan’s claim that the existence of a “furin cleavage site” in the Covid “spike protein” suggests a laboratory origin or whether, as Rasmussen [insists]( there’s nothing particularly important about it. While novice-hood is relative, the more specialized and technical the question, the less relative it is. An average literate person can, with diligence and application, develop some well-informed ideas about this or that case before the Supreme Court. That won’t make them a professor of constitutional law, but it will make them more than an ignoramus. When it comes to spike proteins and furin cleavage sites, the path for most laypeople to mitigate their ignorance is less clear. In place of any actual capacity to evaluate one expert’s technical claim versus another’s, they will be left only with what Goldman calls “indirect argumentative justification,” signals pointing to greater expertise on one side or the other. Goldman’s major example of this: A novice notices that one side offers rebuttals to the other side’s arguments, but the other side doesn’t seem able to do the same. This could be “a (non-conclusive) indicator” that the side offering rebuttals “has a superior fund of information in the domain, or a superior method for manipulating her information, or both.” A weaker indirect justification is “quickness and smoothness,” which could indicate mastery but could also be merely the luck of a charming manner and a quick tongue, or the result of good coaching. In the case of the Covid-origins dispute, perhaps the most pertinent source of evidence by which novices judge experts is Goldman’s fourth type, an appraisal of “the experts’ interests and biases.” That is why the debate has become so bitter. Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis like Richard Ebright have long [asserted]( that the case for Covid’s natural origins has been dishonestly favored by the very scientists, including Anthony Fauci, who they say bear some responsibility for the pandemic. That suspicion is surely one of the reasons that a substantial majority of Americans have come to [favor]( the lab-leak theory. As Goldman puts it, “If two people give contradictory reports, and exactly one of them has a reason to lie, the relative credibility of the latter is seriously compromised.” There are of course biases and interests on the other side, too. Because Ebright has been publicly [concerned]( with the risks of Wuhan-style laboratory work since 2015, a novice could decide that he is too disposed toward seeing his old warnings confirmed. On the other hand, a novice could decide that Ebright’s early warnings about the threat of a lab leak bolsters his “track record” (Goldman’s fifth source of evidence). How you weigh those possibilities against one another will condition your attitude toward Ebright’s trustworthiness. And how you weigh them against the interest that some prominent champions of the natural-origins hypothesis have in insulating laboratories from outside skepticism (from the fear that, as Stewart put it, scientists “don’t know when to stop”) is up to you. SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. Spiders! A giant flying spider — the “Joro” spider — is coming to New York City. As ABC’s Jennifer Vilcarino [explains]( “Joro spiders are light enough to parachute through the air, traveling with the speed of wind, giving the illusion they are flying through a process of ‘ballooning.’” “Ballooning,” the entomologist Michael J. Raupp explains, is when spiders produce “silk webs that act as a parachute; it lifts them into the atmosphere and carries them into the air.” Probably the first time that flying, or ballooning, spiders were closely observed, or at least first written about, in what is now the United States was by a teenage Jonathan Edwards, in a 1723 letter to a member of the Royal Society about “some things that I have happily seen of the wondrous and curious works of the spider": Everybody that is used to the country knows of their marching in the air from one tree to another ... though they are wholly destitute of wings. [...] Resolving if possible to find out the mysteries of their amazing works, and pursuing my observations, I discovered one wonder after another till I have been so happy as very frequently to see their whole manner of working. Edwards would go on to describe, in minute detail and aided by illustrations, the process by which spiders fly. About two decades later, he would return to spiders in his famous sermon, “[Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God]( in which “God ... holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire.” ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Library and Institutional Success Program | July 2024] The Chronicle is partnering with Ithaka S+R to host a brand new [professional development program for librarians]( in July. This innovative two-week program will help library leaders understand the many roles they might take on, boost the success of the campus library, and better align with their institution’s goals. 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