If there was concrete evidence (of the form I described) beyond speculation, I don't know about it. Bats have a relative of the virus, but as was said further up in the conversation and if I understand correctly, it was found very far away from Wuhan in caves that are a lot more interesting for coronavirus researchers than for wildlife traders.

> sars-cov-1

That was the original SARS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS), which from what I understand didn't have the features that made COVID so suspect and whose existence probably was also one of the main drivers of funding for coronavirus gain-of-function research, so the causality there could go either way.

> I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between.

I think it's more than fair to be skeptical - as a 60% believer, in a world where it was the accepted gospel, I'd be one of the skeptics! - but I don't see why "there are different theories that could be glossed as 'lab leak'" is any sort of evidence that the total probability of all the theories that could be glossed as such is lower (relative to the situation where there is exactly one theory).

> But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.

I mean, I could say the same thing of the converse - it seems like most people on the natural origin side just want it to be false for some reason; perhaps they are morally offended by the idea that someone would blame China for the pandemic or certain politicians in the US would get to strut around feeling vindicated, or want some explanation that's more reassuring than that the people who we considered to be our intellectual vanguard to have been short-sighted and irresponsible and caused a lot of damage.

I don't feel a desire to see anything that could be read as "blaming China for the pandemic"; I'm generally for science and skeptical of excessive demands for safety and think that shit happens, and wouldn't even "blame" the Soviet Union for Chernobyl. However, in this particular case, _if_ it were to turn out it was a lab leak, there are obvious comparatively cheap actions we could and should take to make a repeat less likely, and moreover in that situation we would have a strong case to increase oversight over the institutions that worked so hard to try to prevent us from coming to that conclusion (although this last thing might also amount to another grounds on which some people will want the lab leak hypothesis to be false), hopefully increasing our society's general ability to solve problems.

Perhaps I should ask you as well - what would you consider sufficient evidence to convince you that it was a lab leak?