Or that the argument is so pitifully feeble, that there doesn’t seem any point in doing anything more than sitting and laughing at it.
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As Milton said, “They also serve who only point and laugh.”
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Are you accusing Raoult of fabricating his data? This is a very serious accusation that should not be made without solid evidence. Do you have these evidence? And do you know that Raoult has sued his accusers for defamation and harassment.
When I see arguments attacking people instead the substance of the argument usually the argument is over the target.
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What substance?
When an argument cites the claims of two notorious cranks, it has none.
And it is equally risible for you, Bill ‘look the Howe diagram’ Cole to lecture about substance.
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You cannot get beyond the ad hominem attack and have a real argument? The use of the word crank is a labeling fallacy. Within 13 words you have committed 2 logical fallacies 
quite talented.
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Sanford wrote a paper presenting evidence of genetic entropy in H1N1 and then submitted it for publication in a peer review scientific journal. And guess what? Instead of sitting and laughing at it, the reviewers found the work worthy of publication. Isn’t that strange?
All in all, I think Bill’s interpretation is the right one!
Those same accumulating mutations can make an outbreak worse by making some variants more transmissible. The effects of mutations aren’t fixed, but depend a lot on context. Overall, SARS-CoV-2 genomes worldwide have accumulated ~300,000 mutations and counting relative to the Wuhan strain (with an average rate of 7.23 mutations per sample analyzed, although the authors think it may be higher for several reasons), with some variants getting fitter from this but not others.
This is normal and not new. Naturally we expect some variants to pick up deleterious mutations that would make them less likely to infect new hosts. Don’t forget that most substitutions in the SARS-CoV-2 genomes are selectively neutral, with the remaining diminishing or improving viral fitness.
Nothing new about cranks loving up on each other.
Did Raoult consider HIV too whose insane substitution rate has made it a nightmare to medical researchers? What about tumors which brazenly pick up mutations (including chromosomal changes) that make them get worse over time in many cases? Finally did you examine his sources or you just swallowed his presentation whole because he seems to support GE?
Yeah, he has joined the company of fantasy - driven people.
Some nice articles to read.
For SARS-CoV-2:
LTEEs for HIV:
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He has already been accused, by Elizabeth Bik.
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Yes, and his has sued her for diffamation and harassement.
Questioning the credibility of claimed experts is hardly an ad hominem attack. And I’m hardly alone in considering them cranks.
Sanford’s Genetic Entropy claims have been repeatedly debunked on this forum. That he managed to get them into a journal says more about the imperfections of peer review than about any quality in his paper.
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So he’s a litigious crank.
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No surprise. Crankish stuff gets past peer-review at the journal level all the time, but when it comes to community review by the larger community of scientists, they don’t survive (an example is that positive Elgazzar ivermectin study that was retracted due to data fraud-related concerns). Genetic entropy has met the same fate. It is bunk.
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It’s exactly what it is. You are now supporting your claim with a biased source making an ad hominem attack. You are on a roll
The cocktail Raoult used was not the same as what the FDA used to test. Hydroxy chloroquine down regulates the NFKB pathway which is a shared mechanism with vitamin d. The NFKB pathway expresses cytokines. The ones using the label pseudoscience are projecting.
No, it is merely rebutting an Argument from authority by pointing out that the purported authorities aren’t credible.
https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/etm.2018.5708
Are you claiming that Covid is an Autoimmune disease? If not, then this paper would seem to be totally irrelevant.
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Of what relevance is that animal study with HCQ to Covid-19?
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Covid deaths are frequently caused by the up regulation of cytokines IL6 etc called in the media the cytokine storm. The NFKB pathway transcribes cytokines.
From the NIH website:
A severe immune reaction in which the body releases too many cytokines into the blood too quickly. Cytokines play an important role in normal immune responses, but having a large amount of them released in the body all at once can be harmful. A cytokine storm can occur as a result of an infection, autoimmune condition, or other disease. It may also occur after treatment with some types of immunotherapy. Signs and symptoms include high fever, inflammation (redness and swelling), and severe fatigue and nausea. Sometimes, a cytokine storm may be severe or life threatening and lead to multiple organ failure. Also called hypercytokinemia.
If all a person ever did was call people cranks, and they never did anything to substantively rebut their claims, electing instead to just dismiss them as cranks, sure. But the merits of the claims of both Sanford and Raoult have been discussed on this website at length. And they’re cranks. And now Gilbert is literally acting as a vector for misinformation bringing two cranks together. Hence crank-magnetism.
Stop crying about this stupid “labeling fallacy”. Your heroes are cranks. Sanford’s H1N1 paper has been utterly shredded to pieces on this website. It’s ABSOLUTE AND TOTAL TRASH. Claptrap. Nonsense. Balderdash. Just search for it, it’s been done to death.
And there’s zero evidence SARS-Cov2 is losing fitness as a consequence of accumulation of deleterious mutations. Genetic Entropy is about fitness, but virulence isn’t fitness. That’s been discussed to death before too.
Neither virulence(or “severity” as Gilbert described it) nor transmissibility are directly interchangeable with fitness, even though there is some relationship. Of course, transmissibility of variants is known to have gone up not down, and the extinction of different lineage variants of SARS-Cov2 is due to being outcompeted by variants better at moving through a partially vaccinated population.
And to the extend SARS-Cov2 is declining in virulence it is because of rising vaccination numbers among those most vulnerable (they were, after all, most likely to get vaccinated first). The elderly, those with co-morbidities and so on. And in large part also because doctors have gotten increasingly better at treating the infected (whether vaccinated or not).
And that’s why Sanford and Raoult are cranks, and Gilbert is a magnet.
Edit: Unnecessary insults removed.
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This is your opinion Rum and not an argument. Thats why the discipline of avoiding logical fallacies is important. Donald Trump who I know you loved was the master of labeling fallacies.
All this is effective when people have a superficial understanding of a subject and are not familiar with proper philosophical discourse.
Mathematically sequences will break down with random change.
The way living organisms cellular DNA slows this down is with error correction, purifying selection and in the case of multicellular organisms apoptosis.
Dr. Sanford has a basic model behind the science he is proposing. Science is always tentative but his thesis makes sense to idiots like me and Gil.
What you quote is both my opinion and a counter-argument to your claim, that calling people like Raoult and Sanford cranks, is a “labeling fallacy”. And I am in fact correct, their claims have been discussed on this website at length. And through that we found overwhelming evidence for their crankery.
No, that’s not the reason why avoiding logical fallacies is important. And avoiding logical fallacies is not a discipline. It’s a fundamental premise in rational discourse. And it’s important because only through correct reasoning can we have any hope of discovering truth.
That rules you out then. Because you have no understanding of the subject, and seem allergic to proper philosophical discourse.
Sequences don’t “break down”, they just change. And in evolution there’s this thing called natural selection. Of course, if you already have a nonfunctional sequence and you keep changing it, evidence shows you will often times quickly discover a function. Remember that paper where they evolved a long RNA sequence consisting only of A’s, under the accumulation of random change and selection for a function? It evolved a function.
Wow Bill, you said something almost entirely accurate for once. Great. Yes, the accumulation of random change is slowed down by error correction, purifying selection, and programmed cell death. Of course, random change combined with natural selection can also lead to increases in fitness and novel molecular and phenotypic traits.
I’ll give Sanford credit for at least stating a hypothesis that is not obviously logically incoherent. Of course Sanford is a young Earth creationist, so he doesn’t care that his hypothesis is inconsistent with the data though, leading someone like Gilbert to literally postulate a supernatural force to counteract the mostly untestable predictions of Genetic Entropy. Untestable because we’re never given timeframes, only the entirely vacuous handwave that “things should be running down yo, dunno when or how long, just… eventually, or Soon™”.
I’m not even kidding. Gilbert, not being a YEC like Sanford, runs into the problem that life is extremely old and hasn’t disappeared to GE billions of years ago, so to explain that he posits GE is still true, but a “mYsTeRiOuS fOrCe” is keeping life going on Earth over geological timescales. Now that is funny.
Consider you come up with an equation for gravity that says all the planets should immediately nosedive straight into the center of the Sun. You look up at the sky and squint hard and long enough to manage the realization that your “theory” disagrees with observation. The solar system seems quite a lot more stable than your equation predicts. What do you do? Well of course! A SUPERNATURAL FORCE must be keeping the planets in orbit, because your equation “makes sense to people like you”.
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