why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
Viruses need a way to reproduce first of all. To do that they need to get inside a cell and hijack its machinery.
Once they have done that, and made more of themselves, they need to get out so they can infect more cells and reproduce.
The easiest strategy for that is to reproduce fast and burst the cell open, releasing thousands of new viruses. Any virus that “went easy” on its host cell would produce fewer viruses, and be swamped by the viruses that did it quicker.
The virus does not know or care whether its cell is part of a larger organism or not. It’s simply trying to reproduce as much and as quickly as possible.
Of course, if it is in a multicellular organism, it will have to get out otherwise it will ultimately fail when its host dies.
This has led to evolution making it better at infecting places where it’s more likely to escape the host- the upper part of the lungs, where it can be coughed out, or the nose, where it can be sneezed onto others.
Evolution has tried hundreds of thousands of ways that virus can reproduce, and only the ones that work really well have survived.
Whether the host dies in the process is pretty immaterial to the virus – unless the host dies before that virus can escape.
Latest Answers