Category: science communication

The moon is a long way off and it is impossible to get there

Does our whole system of physics forbid us from believing someone has been on the moon?

Keith S. Taber

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay (with Emoji superimposed)

I never had the chance to interview Ludwig for my research, but was intrigued when I found out about his outright dismissal of the possibility of manned missions to the moon.

There are of course people who are strongly committed to ideas at odds with current scientific consensus – suggesting the earth is flat; that evolution does not occur; that COVID-19 was deliberately produced in a laboratory; that governments have physical evidence of alien visitors, but deny it and keep all relevant documentation classified; and so forth.

Moon landing deniers

Even in the United States of America, the home of the Apollo missions, surveys regularly show that a substantial minority of people doubt that people ever actually went to the moon, and think the Apollo moon landings were faked. Why would NASA have gone to such trouble with the collusion of the US Government machinery and the support of Hollywood studios?

As President Kennedy had put such weight on (American) people getting to the moon before the end of the 1960s, then – the argument goes – once it became clear this was technically impossible, it became important to convince the population that JFK's challenge had been met by a massive initiative to forge and disseminate evidence. There has been something of an industry in explaining how the photographs released by NASA can be seen to have been clearly faked if one looks carefully enough and knows a little science.

Unreasonable doubt?

I try to be someone who is always somewhat sceptical (as any scientist should be) of any claims, no matter how widely believed, as in time some canonical ideas are found to be flawed – even in science. But I tend to give little credence to such conspiracy theories.

Sometimes there are good reasons why science is doubted by sections of the public when it seems to conflict with well established world-view beliefs deriving from religious traditions or traditional ecological knowledge which has sustained a culture for a great many generations. So, even when the science is well supported, we can sometimes understand why some people find it difficult to accept. But the Apollo missions being faked in a film studio: surely that is just the kind of nonsense that only ignorant cranks like to believe – isn't it?

Ludwig on the sure belief that no one has been to the moon

Thus my interest in Ludwig, who was certainly not an ignorant person. Indeed he was highly intelligent, and something of an intellectual – a deep thinker who was very interested in the nature of knowledge and considered issues of how we could ground our beliefs, given that the evidence was never sufficient to be absolutely sure.

He thought that individual ideas were convincing when they were embedded in a 'nest' of related ideas – what we might call a conceptual framework. One example he discussed was his accepting that people always had parents: he thought this "sure belief" was based "not only on the fact that I have known the parents of certain people but on everything that I have learnt about the sexual life of human beings and their anatomy and physiology: also on what I have heard and seen of animals". Ludwig thought that although this could not be considered definite proof, it was robust grounds for someone to accept the belief.

Another example of such a sure belief was that a person could be confident that they had never been on the moon,

A principal ground for [a person] to assume that he was never on the moon is that no one ever was on the moon or could come [i.e., get] there; and this we believe on grounds of what we learn.

¶171

Physics forbids moon landings

Ludwig seemed to consider the impossibility of people getting to be on the moon was something he could be pretty sure of,

"But is there no objective truth? Isn't it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?" If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions "How did he overcome the force of gravity?" "How could he live without an atmosphere?" and a thousand others which could not be answered…

The intellectual status of unreasonable people

So someone making such a claim would not be a 'reasonable' person in Ludwig's evaluation. So how would Ludwig feel about such an unreasonable person?

We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.

¶108

But of course there are people who claim this has indeed happened, that we have been to the moon,and walked there and whilst there collected rocks and indeed played golf. (Had this been more recent, we would perhaps instead have danced the tango and baked cakes.) NASA astronauts have since often acted as ambassadors for space science, and told their stories across the world, including to the young – enthusing many of them about space and science.

How might Ludwig respond to a child who had met one of those Apollo astronauts who claimed to have walked on the moon?

Suppose some adult had told a child that he had been on the moon. The child tells me the story, and I say it was only a joke, the man hadn't been on the moon, no one has ever been on the moon, the moon is a long way off and it is impossible to climb up there or fly there.

Ludwig adds, rhetorically,

If now the child insists, saying perhaps there is a way of getting there which I don't know, etc. what reply could I make to him?

¶106

Believers in moon landings are ignorant and wrong

So how could Ludwig explain that there are many people, indeed a majority today, who do believe that people have visited the moon, and returned to earth to tell others about the experience?

What we believe depends on what we learn. We all believe that it isn't possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief-they are wrong and we know it.

If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.

¶286

So, just as I might suspect the moonshot deniers are somewhat ignorant, for Ludwig it is the reverse: it is those who think people can get to the moon who have poor knowledge systems and are simply wrong.

Now I suggested above that Ludwig was an intelligent and reflective person – indeed he worked as a school teacher, both in primary and secondary education – so his views may seem incongruent. As some readers may have suspected, I am being a little unfair to Ludwig. I pointed out at the outset that I never had the chance to interview Ludwig – indeed I never met him, although he did spend part of his life in Cambridge where I now work.

We can all be wrong

Ludwig did not live to see the moon landings, as he died in 1951 almost a decade before I was born (of parents – he was right about that), shortly after he wrote the material that I have quoted above. That is a few years before Sputnik was launched by the Soviet Union and the 'space race' began. So, Ludwig was not a denier of the moon landings as such, refusing to accept the media accounts, but rather a denier of the possibility of there ever being moon landings at a time when no one was yet actively planning the feat.

Ludwig was wrong. But had he lived another 20 years I am pretty sure he would have changed his mind. That's because one of the things he was best known for was changing his mind.

Having written a highly influential book of philosophy that convinced many intellectuals he was one of the greatest thinkers of his time, if not all time (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) he took a long sabbatical from Academia, only to later write an equally influential and profound book (that he did not live to see published – the Philosophical Investigations) that contradicted his earlier ideas. Had Ludwig seen the technological developments of the 'space race' in the 1960s, it seems certain – well, a sure belief – that he would have accepted the possibility of people going to the moon.

However, when I first read the comments I quote above I was struck by how such a highly intelligent and deep thinker could be so sure that getting people to the moon was not possible that he actually chose to use the idea of people on the moon as an exemplar of something that was impossible ("it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon"), and indeed contrary to the laws of physics.

Presumably at the time he was writing he could assume most intelligent people would fully accept his position (as "we all believe that it isn't possible to get to the moon") and see the suggestion of people going to the moon as absurd enough to stand as an example of an idea that could not be accepted by us reasonable people, only by someone "intellectually very distant" from us.

However, barely a decade later JFK was convinced enough of the possibility of getting people safely to the moon and back to commit his nation to achieving it – and a decade after that men being on the moon was already ceasing to be seen as anything out of the ordinary (until the near disaster of the Apollo 13 mission got the flights back into the popular imagination).

I do not present this example to ridicule Ludwig Wittgenstein. Far from it. But it does make me reflect on those things that we think we can treat as 'sure beliefs'. Even the most intelligent and reflective of us can be very wrong about things we may treat as certain knowledge. That's always worth keeping in mind.

Nothing is absolutely certain, except, perhaps, uncertainty itself!

All citations are from ¶ in Wittgenstein, L. (1975). On Certainty (D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. v. Wright Eds. Corrected 1st ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

Lies, damned lies, and COVID-19 statistics?

A few days ago WHO reported that the UK had had over 300 000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, but now WHO is reporting the cumulative total is many fewer. How come?

Keith S. Taber

I have been keeping an eye on the way the current pandemic has been developing around the world by looking at the World Health Organisation website (at https://covid19.who.int) which offers regularly updated statistics, globally, regionally, and in those countries with the most cases.

An example of the stats. reported by the WHO (June 23rd 2020)
Note: on this day the UK Prime Minister reported: "In total, 306,210 people have now tested positive for coronavirus" which almost matches the figure shown by WHO (306 214) the next day.

Whilst the information is very interesting (and in view of what it represents, very saddening) there are some strange patterns in the graphs presented – reminding one that measurements can never just be assumed to precise, accurate and reliable. Some of the data looks unlikely to accurate, and in at least one case what is presented is downright impossible.

Questionable stats.

One type of anomaly that stands out is how some countries where the pandemic is active suddenly have a day with no new cases – before the level returning to trend.

This appeared to be the case in both Spain and Italy on 22nd March, and the two months later the same thing happened in Iran. One assumes this has more to do with reporting procedures than blessed days when no one was found to have the infection – although if that was the case should there not be some compensation in the following days (perhaps so in Spain above, but apparently not in Italy, and certainly not in Iran)?

Less easy to explain away is a peak found in the graph for Chile.

Suddenly for one day, 18th June, a much larger number of cases is reported: but then there is an immediate return to the baseline:

How is it possible that suddenly on one day there are seven times as many cases reported – as a blip superimposed on an otherwise fairly flat trend-line? Perhaps there is a rational explanation – but unfortunately the WHO site is rich in stats, but does not seem to offer interpretation or explanations *. Without a rationale, one wonder just how trustworthy the stats actually are.

Obviously false information

Even if there are explanations for some of these odd patterns due to the practicalities of reporting, and the ongoing development of systems of testing and reporting, in different jurisdictions, there is one anomaly that cannot be feasibly explained – where the data is surely, and clearly, wrong.

An example of the stats reported by the WHO (July 6th 2020)

So the graph above shows the nations with the most reported cases as of the last few days. This is a more recent update than the similar image at the top of this page. Yet, the cumulative total of confirmed cases for the United Kingdom in this figures is something like 20 000 cases LESS than the figure quoted in the EARLIER set of graphs. (Note that this has allowed the UK to have lower cumulative totals than either Chile or Peru – which would not have been the case without this reduction in cumulative total.)

The total number of confirmed cases in the UK is now (7th July) LESS that it was a week ago (see above). How come? Well, a close look the graph below explains this. The drop in cumulative numbers is due to the number of new cases that WHO gives as reported on 3rd July, when there were -29 726 new cases. Yes, that's right minus 29 thousand odd cases.

The WHO data show negative cases (-525 new cases) for the UK on May 21st as well, but on the 3rd July the magnitude of the negative number of confirmed cases is over three times as many as the highest daily number of positive new cases on any single day (April 12th, i.e., 8719 new cases).

I can imagine that if it was identified that a previous miscalculation had occurred it might be necessary to revise previous data. But surely an adjustment would be made to the earlier data: not the cumulative total corrected by interjecting a large negative number of cases on some arbitrary date in order to put the total right. [Note: the most recent data I can find on the UK government site cites 309,360 confirmed cases as of 26th June (2020-06-26 COVID-19 Press Conference Slides) so as of yet the UK data does not show the reduction in cumulative total being published by WHO.**]

Yet surely someone at WHO must have spotted that the anomaly is bizarre and brings their reports into question. The negative cases claimed for the UK on that one day are so great that the UK line has since burrowed into the graphics for completely different countries. (See below. On the day the UK graph was located above the graphic for Mexico, the UK line actually went down so far it actually crossed below the line for Mexico.)

Of course, each unit in these figures represents someone, a fellow human somewhere in the world, who has been found to be infected with a very serious, and sometimes fatal, virus. Fixating on the stats can distract from the real human drama that many of these cases represent. Yet, when the data reflect something so important, and when data are so valuable in understanding and responding to the global pandemic, such an obvious flaw in the data is disappointing and worrying.

*I could not find a link to send an email; a tweet did not get a response from @WHO; and an invitation to type my question on the website was met by the site bot with a suggestion to return to the data I was asking about.

** If I subsequently learn of the reason for the report of negative numbers of cases in these statistics, I will post an update here.

Update at 2020-07-12: duplicate testing

As of Saturday 11 July 2020 at 6:20pm
The UK government reports
Total number of lab-confirmed UK cases
288,953
Total number of people who have had a positive test result

So this is less than they were reporting a week earlier, despite their graph (for England, where most cases are because it is the most populous county of the UK) not showing any dip:

However, I did find this explanation:

"The data published on this website are constantly being reviewed and corrected. Cumulative counts can occasionally go down from one day to the next, and on some occasions there have been major revisions that have a significant effect on local, regional, National or UK totals. Data are provided daily from several different electronic data collection systems and these can experience technical issues which can affect daily figures, usually resulting in lower daily counts. The missing data are normally included in the data published the following day.

From 2 July 2020, Pillar 2 data [from "swab testing for the wider population" i.e., than just "for those with a clinical need, and health and care workers"] has been reported separately by all 4 Nations. Pillar 2 data for England has had duplicate tests for the same person removed by PHE [Public Helth England] from 2 July 2020. This means that the cumulative total number of UK lab-confirmed cases is now around 30,000 lower than reported on 1 July 2020."

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/about

So that explains the mystery – but duplicate reporting at that level seems extraordinary! It does not support confidence in official statistics. An error of c.10% suggests a systemic flaw in the methodology being used. It also makes one wonder about the accuracy of some of the figures being quoted for elsewhere in the world.

This can only mean…it's the core of a giant planet

Keith S. Taber

Image by LoganArt from Pixabay 

My interest was piqued by an item in the BBC Radio 4 news bulletin broadcast at 17.01 today (Wed 1st July 2020). Science reporter, Paul Rincon, reported:

Giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn have a solid planetary core beneath a thick atmosphere of gas, but no one has ever been able to see what these solid cores are like.
Now a team of astronomers has found an object that fits the description, orbiting a star like the sun that's 730 light years away.
The team knew the object must be the core of a giant planet,
because it is unusually dense for its size. It's about three and a half times bigger than earth, but thirty nine times heavier.
Objects with these properties are thought to draw gas in to form giant planets. Astronomers are planning more observations which could test ideas about how planets form.

Item on BBC Radio 4 PM News on 1st July 2020

Some years back I wrote a Reflection on Teaching and Learning Physics column called 'Documentaries can only mean one thing', as a response to my frustration about how science in the media was presented. Even quality science programmes that I really enjoyed, such as Horizon documentaries, would commonly include the phrase "this could only mean".

This was seldom, if ever, justified. What was meant was that the scientist concerned considered one particular interpretation to be convincing. The scientists themselves were unlikely to ever claim that there was only one possible interpretation of the data – but the writers and journalists clearly thought that viewers needed certainty.

This is important, of course, because we try to teach young people about the nature of science – and that means that all theories are underdetermined by evidence, and that scientific knowledge is technically provisional – open to being revisited in the light of new evidence or a new perspective that makes better sense of the data. Science involves argumentation to seek to persuade the community, and even when consensus is reached, the community can later revisit the issue.

So any suggestion that "this can only mean [whatever]" belongs in a different domain to the natural sciences – perhaps logic or mathematics. Any journalists who insist on presenting science in this way are undermining the work of school science teachers charged with teaching young people about the nature of science. So my question here is:

[did] the team know the object [that is, the object believed to be 730 light years away] must be the core of a giant planet?

No, of course not. This might be their current preferred interpretation, but it is not something they know for certain.

Because, they are not ideologues, or prophets, but scientists.

And the one thing a scientist can know for certain, is that scientific knowledge is never certain.

Natural rates of infection and the optimum level of simplification

How much dumbing down is good for our health?

Keith S. Taber

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay 

I just heard the UK Prime Minister introduce a public information message about what would be considered when deciding to ease current measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two particular statements in the clip played gained my attention:

  • "All viruses, like normal 'flu, have a rate of infection. Scientists call this R. R is the average number of people one infected person passes the virus onto."
  • "In March, at its peak, R was around 3, which seems to be the natural rate for this virus."

Neither of these statements seemed strictly correct to me.

To make things clearer, let's call a spade, a fork

Surely the rate of infection is the number of people who are infected in a unit time period – say per day. R is something else – the reproduction number. Now, those working in the public understanding of science, just as in science education, have to seek an optimum level of simplification when communicating with non-experts. There is no point using complex language that will be unclear to people, and so likely lead to them disengage with the message. So, simplification may indeed be needed. But not such a degree of simplification that what we say no longer adequately represents the ideas we are trying to convey.

But the term 'reproduction number' is not some really obscure and inaccessible jargon – it uses words that most people are quite familiar and comfortable with.It does not seem any more technical and frightening that the term 'rate of infection'. Now I accept that perhaps the compound phrase 'reproduction number' is itself unfamiliar, whereas 'rate of infection' is more commonly heard. BUT rate of infection already has a meaning, a different one – so is it sensible to confuse matters by defining rate of infection with a new meaning inconsistent with the existing common usage?

This seems an odd way to promote public understanding of science to me. This is a bit like deciding that the term 'electrical field' may seem a bit too technical for an audience, so it will be a good idea to instead start calling it 'gravity' from now on, because people are used to that term. Or thinking that 'water of crystallisation' sounds obscure, so deciding to refer to the copper sulphate crystal incorporating 'ice cubes' when talking to non-experts because they know what ice cubes are (i.e., something other than molecules of water of crystallisation!).

So what is natural about rates of viral infection?

I was not sure precisely what a normal 'flu was (in relation to an abnormal 'flu, presumably?), but was more surprised to the reference to a virus having a natural rate of infection – even if this actually meant a natural reproduction number.

Will this not depend on the conditions in which the virus exists?* R will surely be very different in a population that is sparsely spread with small social group sizes than in a population that is largely living in extended family groups in overcrowded slums – so what is the natural environment for that virus?

We have reduced R by social distancing and increased hygiene measures. Are we to assume what is natural is the work and social (and hygiene) habits of the UK population as it was in February 2020, rather than now? If so, were the social conditions in the UK in 1920 or 1820 'unnatural'? So, I think the reference to the rate (actually R) being 3 is not a natural rate, but the R value contingent on the specific conditions of UK social and economic activity at a particular historical moment. To believe that the way WE live NOW (or, actually, two months ago) reflects what is natural seems a very anthropocentric notion of 'natural'.

The natural state of things (Image by Samuele Schirò from Pixabay )

I guess I am being pedantic (one of the few things I tend to be good at – and we all need to work to our strengths) but it seems to me that if you are going to commission a public health message at a time when the public understanding of science is actually a matter of life and death, then it is worth trying to get the science right.

* This seemed intuitively obvious, but I thought I ought to check. A quick web-search led to lots of different estimates of R (or R0, that is R whilst a population is all susceptible) presented as if there was a single right value (even if we do not know it precisely) that applied across different contexts globally. Hm. So, I was reassured to come across: "Firstly, R0 is not an intrinsic variable of the infectious agent, but it is calculated through at least three parameters: the duration of contagiousness; the likelihood of infection per contact between; and the contact rate, along with economical, social and environmental factors, that may vary among studies aimed to estimate the R0", Viceconte and  Petrosillo, 2020, COVID-19 R0: Magic number or conundrum?, Infectious Disease Reports, 12(1).

So who's not a clever little virus then?

The COVID-19 virus is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either) 1

Keith S. Taber

Image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay 

One of the things I have noticed in recent news reports about the current pandemic is the tendency to justify our susceptibility to the COVID-19 coronavirus by praising the virus. It is an intelligent and sneaky foe, and so we have to outwit it.

But no, it is not. It is a virus. It's a tiny collection of nucleic material packaged in a way that it can get into the cells which contain the chemical resources required for the virus to replicate. It is well suited to this, but there is nothing intelligent about the behaviour. (The virus does not enter the cell to reproduce any more than an ice cube melts to become water; or a hot cup of coffee radiates energy to cool down; or a toddler trips over to graze its knee rather than because gravity acts on it.) The virus is not clever nor sneaky. That would suggest it can adapt its behaviour, after reflecting upon feedback from its interactions with the environment. It cannot. Over generations viruses change – but with a lot of variations that fail to replicate (the thick ones in the family?)

Yet any quick internet search finds references to the claimed intellectual capacities of these deadly foes. Now of course an internet search can find references to virtually anything – but I am referring to sites we might expect to be authoritative, or at least well-informed. And this is not just a matter of a hasty response to the current public health emergency as it is not just COVID 19, but, it seems, viruses generally that are considered intellectually superior.

Those smart little viruses

The site Vaccines Today has a headline in a posting from 2014, that "Viruses are 'smart', so we must be smarter", basing its claims on a lecture by Colin Russell, Royal Society University Research Fellow at Cambridge University. It reports that "Dr Russell says understanding how 'clever' viruses are can help us to outsmart them". (At least there are 'scare quotes' in some of these examples.)

An article from 2002 in an on-line journal has the title "The contest between a clever virus and a facultatively clever host". Now I have moaned about the standard of many new internet journals, but this is the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, and the article is in volume 95, so I think it is safe to apply the descriptor 'well-established' to this journal.

A headline in Science news for Students (published by Society for Science & the Public) from 2016 reads "Sneaky! Virus sickens plants, but helps them multiply". I am sure it would not take long to find many other examples. An article in Science refers to a "nasty flu virus".

Sneaky viruses

COVID-19 is a sneaky virus according to a doctor writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Quite a few viruses seem to be sneaky – the the human papillomavirus is according to an article in the American Journal of Bioethics. The World Health Organisation considers that a virus that causes swine fever, H1N1, is sneaky according to an article in Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy, something also reported by the BMJ.

There are many references in the literature to clever viruses, such as Epstein‐Barr virus according to a piece in the American Journal of Transplantation. The Hepatitis C virus is clever according to an article in Clinical Therapeutics.

Science communication as making the unfamiliar, familiar

Science communication is a bit like teaching in that the purpose of communication is often to be informative (rather than say, social cohesion, like a lot of everyday conversation {and, by the way,it was another beautiful day here in Cambridgeshire today, blue sky – was it nice where you are?}) and indeed to make the unfamiliar, familiar. Sometimes we can make the unfamiliar familiar by showing people the unfamiliar and pointing it out. 'This is a conical flask'. Often, however, we cannot do that – it is hard to show someone hyperconjugation or hysteresis or a virus specimen. Then we resort to using what is familiar, and employing the usual teacher tricks of metaphor, analogy, simile, modelling, graphics, and so forth. What is familiar to us all is human behaviour, so personification is a common technique. What the virus is doing, we might suggest, is hijacking the cell's biochemical machinery, as if it is a carefully planned criminal operation.

Strong anthropomorphism and dead metaphors

This is fine as far as it goes – that is, if we use such techniques as initial pedagogic steps, as starting points to develop scientific understanding. But often the subsequent stage does not happen. Perhaps that is why there are so many dead metaphors in the language – words introduced as metaphors, which over time have simple come to be take on a new literal meaning. Science does its fair share of borrowing – as with charge (when filling a musket or canon). Dead metaphors are dead (that is metaphorical, of course, they were never actually alive) because we simply fail to notice them as metaphors any more.

There are probably just as many references to 'clever viruses' referring to computer viruses as to microbes – which is interesting as computer viruses were once only viruses metaphorically, but are now accepted as being another type of virus. They have become viruses by custom and practice, and social agreement.

Whoever decided to first refer to the covalent bond in terms of sharing presumably did not mean this in the usual social sense, but the term has stuck. The problem in education (and so, presumably, public communication of science) is that once people think they have an understanding, an explanation that works for them, they will no longer seek a more scientific explanation.

So if the teacher suggests an atom is looking for another electron (a weak form of anthropomorphism, clearly not meant to be taken too seriously – atoms are not entities able to look for anything) then there is a risk that students think they know what is going on, and so never seek any further explanation. Weak anthropomorphism becomes strong anthropomorphism: the atom (or virus) behaves like a person because it has needs and desires just like anyone else.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay 

Why does it matter?

Perhaps in our current situation this is not that important – the public health emergency is a more urgent issue than the public understanding of the science. But it does matter in the long term. Viruses are not clever – they have evolved over billions of years, and a great many less successful iterations are no longer with us. The reason it matters is because evolution is often not well understood.

As an article in Evolution News and Science Today (a title that surely suggests a serious science periodical about evolution) tells us again that "Viruses are, to all appearances, very clever little machines" and asks "do they give evidence of intelligent design" (that is, rather than Darwinian natural selection, do they show evidence of having an intelligent designer?) After exploring some serious aspects of the science of viruses, the article concludes: "So it seems that viruses are intelligently designed" – that is, a position at odds with the scientific understanding that is virtually a consensus view based on current knowledge. Canonical science suggests that natural processes are able to explain evolution. But these viruses are so clever they must surely have been designed (Borg technology, perhaps?)

This is why I worry when I hear that viruses are these intelligent, deliberate agents that are our foes in some form of biological warfare. It is a dangerous way of thinking. So, I'm concerned when I read, for example, that the cytomegalovirus is not just a clever virus but a very clever virus. Indeed, according to an article in Cell Host & Microbe "CMV is a very clever virus that knows more about the host immune system and cell biology than we do". Hm.

(Read about 'anthropomorphism')

Footnote:

1. The subheading was amended on 4th October 2021, after it was quite rightly pointed out to me that the original version, "COVID-19 is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either)", incorrectly conflated the disease with the virus.