why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
Viruses are not, in the conventional meaning of this word, alive.
They force bodies to recreate them, but they are essentially a weird form of single use pendrive.
Quoting a source i didn’t check :
>Most biologists say no. Viruses are not made out of cells, they can’t keep themselves in a stable state, they don’t grow, and they can’t make their own energy. Even though they definitely replicate and adapt to their environment, viruses are more like androids than real living organisms.
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.
They see their host organism as an infinite pool of resource. Their built in reproduction mechanism exploit those resource as much and as fast as possible. Exponential growth is a metric of success.
Short sighed consumerism.
Until it’s too late.
Totally unrelated, Jean-Baptiste Say, one of the fathers of modern economics, in [1828](https://www.manageris.com/synopsis-evolving-towards-circular-economy-20682.html): “Natural resources are infinite because, if they weren’t, we would not obtain them freely. Since they cannot be multiplied, nor exhausted, they cannot be the object of economic sciences.”
It remains to be proven that humans are smarter than viruses.
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.
Viruses don’t think or doing anything consciously. Their sole goal is to replicate as much as possible.
Since there are a lot of very good answers here, I’d like to add a question: would there be any negative effects if we were to figure out a way to eradicate *all* viruses overnight? In other words, are there any upsides to viruses?
They don’t mean to, that’s mostly a side effect of multiplying too much / heavy war against the imune system. Sometimes it’s not the virus but your body attack the virus that’s actually making you sick/kills you.
Also, this is why you sneeze / have runny nose when you’re sick with airborne diseases.. it’s wants to ensure it lives on and thus spread to as many place/hosts as possible. Same for STDs and the like.
Because viruses aren’t intelligent beings that are aware of their host. A virus is just a small amount of genetic material surrounded by proteins. All it is able to do is carry out whatever the tiny amount of DNA/RNA tells it to do, which is usually inject its DNA or RNA into the host cell, and to hijack the cell to reproduce itself.
Why do humans try to kill the earth even though its keeping them alive ?
People are saying that viruses don’t try to kill people and they’re half correct. A virus doesn’t care if it kills its host or not, it only cares about passing on to the next host before it kills its current host. There’s generally a balance to this. A virus that’s too aggressive will kill its host too quickly and it won’t pass on its genes. A virus that’s too mild won’t replicate enough to spread before the immune system finds it and kills it. Ideally (in an evolutionary sense) a virus will replicate enough to be very infectious but not so much that the host is likely to die before it spreads. How it dies after spreading is irrelevant to the virus—whether the immune system eliminates it or it dies because the host dies, it’s successful if it spread to new hosts before its end.
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