That's incredibly interesting! Do you know some (pop)science books that could help learn more about viruses? I found two that sound good from description: "Viruses: A Very Short Introduction" by Dorothy H. Crawford and "A Planet of Viruses" by Carl Zimmer. Would you recommend any of these or something else?
I'm not really in a position to suggest a good book on viruses. I found out about this from a pop-sci book on latest research on aging and longevity.
When it comes to viruses though, there's one more very fascinating hypothesis. That the cell nucleus itself was once actually a virus that took over some bacteria to do its bidding.
Red queen gives some perspective on evolutionary arms race between hosts and pathogen. Virus is a piece of genetic material, so to understand a virus one needs to understand how a gene evolves.
It’s not a science book, but this did bring to mind an enjoyable sci-fi book by Greg Bear called Darwin’s Radio, for reasons that’ll be obvious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Radio
