why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
They don’t “try to kill” anything. They’re simply exploiting their environment to reproduce. What kills the host is the damage they do along the way. And often, initially, that’s quite significant.
But. If they’re so virulent that they kill their host before they can find a new host environment, or they tend to eliminate their pool of hosts, those are dead ends (no pun intended). So in practice, (at least) two types of mutations tend to emerge and dominate – ones that are as damaging but better at evading the host’s defenses and can spread better, and ones that do less damage and therefore have more time and chance to spread.
Over time the second one of those seems to win out. If you look at most viral diseases in the past, they were way more dangerous in their early days than later on.
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