> Also no idea what viruses and cancers have to do with this. Cancer is surely very poor reproductively because they never spread to other hosts The host's sur

> Also no idea what viruses and cancers have to do with this. Cancer is surely very poor reproductively because they never spread to other hosts The host's survival is not the benchmark of the reproductive unit, which are the cancer's cells short-term reproduction. The distinction is the reason benchmaxxing is in fact not good: the benchmark is only approximately related to what people actually care about. You do want your cells to reproduce sucessfully, after all; you just also want some emergency stop buttons for when they go wrong, and those things failing is your body's benchmark rather than your cell's benchmark. (There's at least two examples of cancers that can be spread from host to host; lupine genital and taxmanian devil nasal, IIRC)