[jhanschoo]

Your reply after reading the explanation is like you seeing a farm of branded cows and wondering if it was due to extreme natural selection that caused that.

From the layperson article:

> In wild viruses, these cutting/pasting sites are randomly distributed because there's no evolutionary pressure for the virus to be thusly cut and pasted in nature. In infectious clones, however, the humans behind the screen tend to modify restriction sites in a regular way. For any given restriction enzyme or set of enzymes, the set of all cutting sites is called the “restriction map”, and looking at these restriction maps helps us see the fingerprint of infectious clones.

> It turns out, the sticky ends produced by BsaI/BsmBI digestion of SARS-CoV-2 are all unique, non-palindromic, and all contain at least one A or T - all criteria either required or recommended for in vitro genome assembly.

[tiagod]

The explanation given is based on some premises that I'm not qualified to assess, and others I am.

One of these premises is that their work properly models reality, there seems to be a lot of well informed doubt by subject-matter experts.

Another is that an event with a probability of 0.1-1% is exceptionally rare, its occurrence thus being most likely artificial, and with that I disagree, by looking at endless counter-examples nature provides.

Is the fact that humans found some optimization a proof that any occurrence of it is man-made? I believe most people would say it isn't.

[timr]

> One of these premises is that their work properly models reality, there seems to be a lot of well informed doubt by subject-matter experts.

The model is fine. There's no more "well informed doubt" than for any other paper. You can certainly debate the details of what they did, but none of this debate is substantial enough to invalidate the work.

What you're seeing is a group of people who have largely pre-judged the outcome, inventing reasons to reject an experiment that disagrees with their prior conclusions. This always happens, in any scientific domain. Nonetheless, there are also a large number of well-informed people who see this as an interesting result. If you don't listen to both groups, you will be misled.

[projektfu]

Cows don't randomly develop brands on the order of 0.1% to 1% probability. There isn't a great analogy for this and your example, as well as the hyena one in another comment, are way overstating the case.