why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
Viruses don’t “try” to do anything. They don’t have brains. They aren’t even technically made of true cells. They merely do what their dna has programmed them to do, which is enter a cell and commandeer it for reproduction. Now the be clear, evolution generally selects for viruses that don’t kill their host. When viruses do kill their host at a high, it’s usually because the virus jumped to a different animal species than the one it evolved to. Ebola is a good example. It doesn’t seem to wipe out entire families of bats when they have it. But it’s really deadly in humans. But that’s because humans aren’t really a host is evolved to thrive in. Typically when a virus jumps to a new host, that lineage either dies off as it kills all of its hosts, or it evolves over time to become less deadly. We’re experiencing this now with COVID. The Syrians that exist today are nowhere near as deadly as the ones from the first two years.
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