The first scenario was genetic manipulation in a laboratory. Andersen and his coauthors dismissed that one, on grounds that the main body of the SARS-CoV-2 genome bore no resemblance to any virus backbone ever known to have been used in viral engineering, and that the RBD was an anomalous concoction of which the effectiveness couldn’t have been foreseen. Only one form of trial and error could have produced it, they judged, a form that is tireless, blind, and infinitely persistent: evolution by natural selection.
