Eli5-If a virus isn’t technically alive, I would assume it doesn’t have instinct. Where does it get its instructions/drive to know to infect host cells and multiply?
In: 7067
Whether it’s technically alive is a matter of definition.
What matters is that if you can arrange for a copy of yourself to be made, there will be more of you. Doesn’t really matter how you do it, or why it happens. Cows are alive, and contain the “machinery” for their own reproduction, but they only exist because we make copies of them. They don’t have an instinct to be farm animals, yet they have something about them that makes another life form want to make more of them. Similarly, a virus contains instructions for making copies of itself. It doesn’t need to want anything, it just needs to be a little machine that makes more little machines.
If more copies of you are made, you’re more “successful”, and those copies can start making even more copies. If you become bad at making copies, for example because a predator eats you faster than you make copies, or copies of something else takes the resources you need, then you’re less successful.
The magic happens when you make *imperfect* copies of yourself. Then they compete against each other, and the more successful ones end up making copies of themselves instead of copies of you. This selects for the best copiers because there are the most copies of them, regardless of what’s making the copies.
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