Submitted by vizo92 t3_zz7rlq in explainlikeimfive
CallFromMargin t1_j2a0nag wrote
Viruses aren't thinkers, they are pushed by laws of natural selection, and those laws can find more than one "good enough" solution, and they often do.
It's true that natural selection often pushed viruses to be more mild but the exact opposite can happen, where natural selection pushed viruses to be super heavily virulent, infect millions of cells, make billions of viruses, cause the organism to spread the virus to a lot of other organisms, and finally die off. Thing is, at least in humans, these viruses "burn" through population rather quickly, and then population becomes immune to them.
Check out deadly yet not-so-dradly viruses, like measals or smallpox. If population of humans has never been exposed to these diseases previously, they will absolutely ravage that population, think native Americans after European arrived. That's maybe 90% of population dead. Yet for most of us measals is not that deadly.
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