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Evolution is just a race to "good enough to consistently reproduce" and everything after the sufficient reproduction is irrelevant. Like the goats whose horns have to be cut or they'll eventually pierce their own brain.

Generally it's more advantageous for your own anatomy not to kill you without intervention, but they reproduce and that checks off the "good enough" box.

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Sometimes, even usually, evolution finds a “local maximum” of effectiveness. Where the solution an organism finds is not optimal but it’s good enough for the organism to survive, even win.

So yeah I’m sure evolution didn’t create something perfect in the disease here but it survives long enough, and kills few-enough people slowly enough in the wild to survive

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If it can spread before killing the host, it has done its job (evolutionarily speaking).
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Viruses don't care if the host dies. Evolution doesn't explain all things in nature.
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Evolution theory by itself doesn’t give us the ability to explain everything in a certain moment, but that’s only due to lack of knowledge on our part.

Consider that measles in itself comes originally from a animal but a mutation found itself be able to spread to humans. That, in and of itself, is the process of evolution.

So while it is not necessarily a useful lens to try to interpret a moment in time as many unknown factors are at play (for example the same gene that is important for mortality might also impact survival in certain environments, and therefore how contagious it could be), if we were to understand it’s history of every mutation that came and went, the environments it lived in, evolution theory would explain why the path looked like it did. And subsequently why it is like it is today.

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I think that question is too simple.

1. We might not be the only hosts or place where it can survive. Measles seems to have mutated from a cattle virus.

2. Killing the host might be the virus' end-game, in which case it evolved to extinction. Mutations nor evolution don't have a goal. There's not always an advantage. I bet most changes aren't advantageous.

3. If you really want to see everything in terms of evolutionary change, the virus could even been seen as a tool in human evolution.

Evolution is a way to look at changes in and forces operating on living things. It is a property that emerges for human observers. Nature doesn't care about it.

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It’s a side effect in a small portion of the infected. It spreads well enough regardless, so it doesn’t particularly hurt it.
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The virus "cares" if it reproduces. There is often tension between the various levels of spreading mechanisms: for example airbourne spread diseases making you cough vs. the cough making the host feel poorly and not interacting with people or the cough killing the host really preventing further spread. There are plenty of optimum points between fast intense disease and asymptomatic disease.

Short term intense disease courses tend to only work for a short period of evolution for new infection mechanisms, the intensity makes them sensitive to any increased immunity which ends up halting the spread for more mild versions. Infectious diseases tend to lower in intensity over the long term.

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