Science wagers can be fun and instructive. Neuroscientist Christof Koch bet dualist philosopher David Chalmers a case of fine wine that the neural signature of consciousness would be found by 2023 — and it wasn’t.

Last year, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, who leads the Astrobiology Research Group at the Technical University of Berlin, bet University of London planetary scientist Ian Crawford a bottle of whisky that within 15 years, “convincing evidence for technological life elsewhere in the Universe will be found.”

OftenSometimes we learn via a wager where a discipline really stands.

So here’s another wager, this time around COVID. Astronomer Martin Rees explained his wager with Harvard linguist Steven Pinker at New Statesman (June 16, 2021),

Although a non-expert, one of us (Martin) first wrote about these hazards in 2002, and realised some better-informed colleagues thought a catastrophe was even more likely to happen than he did. On the Long Bets website he wagered that “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than 31 December 2020”.

This is a bet he fervently hoped to lose, but he was not surprised when, in 2017, the other author of this piece (Steven) took him up on it, with a $400 stake (with the winnings going to charity). Steven had written two books documenting historical declines in violence, poverty, illiteracy and disease, and contrasted the data on those declines with the gloom of commentators whose view of the world was informed by non-random samples of the worst things that happened every day – which is to say, the news.

Martin has argued that these trends, though real, can lull us into undue confidence.

“Wagering catastrophe,” December 6, 2024

Obviously, COVID would fit Rees’s description and thus he would win, with Steven Pinker benefiting the charity — provided that COVID resulted from a lab leak, as seems likely. As science writer Nicholas Wade tells us at The Spectator, Rees’s predictions were

a pretty good description of what probably happened in Wuhan. The scientists there were not bioterrorists but even before the pandemic the experiments they were doing were condemned by critics as unacceptably risky. We found out only in 2021 that the year before the outbreak they were party to a plan, with some funding from the United States, to put a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into a rare kind of bat virus called a sarbecovirus for the first time and test it on human cells and humanized mice — at an inappropriate biosafety level.

In 2019, a sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site turned up for the first and only time in that very same city, Wuhan, leaving no trace of infected animals other than human beings. By the end of June 2020, the virus had caused at least half a million confirmed deaths, and by December another 1.4 million, plus many more unconfirmed ones, easily surpassing Rees’s predicted one million “casualties” in a six-month period.

“Wuhan wager: the $400 ‘bio bet’ that predicted Covid,” December 6, 2024

Trouble is, while both Rees and Pinker now favor the lab leak theory, as Wade reveals, they seemingly don’t want to make relations with China more tense by saying so. So Pinker seems to have technically won the bet. Raising more questions than answers…