why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
They don’t “try” anything, they’re not sentient. Also, much of the damage done from sickness is actually a result of your body fighting the infections. Think of it like this — your white blood cells essentially carpet bomb any area with signs of infection, meaning that your own cells are collateral damage when your body is trying to fight something off that can kill you.
The immune system is way more sophisticated than that but it is a factor. Also, viruses fill your cells with more viruses when they propagate until your cells physically explode, resulting in a lot of waste material being left behind and of course dead tissue.
But there isn’t anything intelligent about viruses, how they target the body, and the mechanics behind how they propagate. It’s a series of chemical reactions between proteins and cell walls (hence why some animals are immune to some diseases or can host diseases while being asymptomatic), millions of years of adaptation, etc.
Any mutations in nature (which is basically any feature that an organism has) we see currently because it was successful by virtue of coincidence, finding success in some population of biodiversity where attributes it has allow it to succeed. It’s not like fish developed fins to swim, it’s that things with fins found success in bodies of water and therefore had successful offspring, same as viruses.
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