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?

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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?

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In the simplest of terms, in a same way that a rock knows how to roll downhill – rock doesnt really know anything, but the laws of phisics make the rock roll down. Biology is chemistry, and chemistry is physics.
Everyhting is just an ongoing chemical interactions between reactive elements.
In essence, a virus is a complex combination of chemicals, that just happened to react in particular way when encountering another particular complex combination of chemicals (host cell), that results in chemical interaction and duplication.

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