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Philipp Markolin
Personal blog · protagonistfuture.substack.comsciencewriting
Philipp Markolin writes Protagonist Science, a personal blog at protagonistfuture.substack.com about science and writing. Since 2022, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this Substack by Philipp Markolin on COVID-19 origins, which argues for zoonotic origin and includes a Bayesian analysis of evidence from the Huanan market.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Science journalism, scicomm, and science fiction prototyping to bring science and society closer together.
What Hacker News says?
Yep - there are a ton of such points of evidence. The strict "lab leak" proponents have essentially made an unfalsifiable hypothesis akin to the intelligent design people's "God of the Gaps" where each time there's new research that disproves a core assumption, that just means the conspiracy goes deeper. I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's…
Comment linking /p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w
on “What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?”Submitted Lableak truther loses $100k in his own debate as a story · 30 points
HN discussionFor those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vi…
Comment linking /p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w
on “What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?”Submitted Nature’s Neglected GoF Laboratory as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm bored of this debate that happens every time one of these charlatans releases a paper that grabs a bunch of headlines and is disproven two days later (as already has happened with the original in this thread). But "This happening" needs to be defined for Bayes to be of any use. State clearly what you think happened and it can be judged, because as has been proven over and over again, the virus is of natural orig…
Comment linking /p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w
on “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?”A virologist did a fairly comprehensive Bayesian analysis. It's long and technical but he's fully on "team zoonotic": https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... There's fleetingly little evidence of anything aside from a natural origin. This could be consistent with a natural virus collected at the WIV which subsequently escaped, but the multiple lineages at the market makes this extremely unlik…
Comment linking /p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w
on “Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic”