I am aware that this is common usage. I am also aware that this common usage has many critics, who hope that members of the general public gain a better understanding of science than most members of the general public now have.
Teleogical explanations (the organism does this because of a desire or drive to survive) are especially common in popular "explanations" of evolution, but they are still errors. Organisms survive or not because of some outcome of their interaction with the inanimate natural world and with other organisms, period. It's perfectly possible for a virus to evolve that kills off its entire host population. (Very likely, that has happened more than once in evolutionary history.) No tendency to survive to reproduce in another generation should be appealed to in order to "explain" why most viruses are not as virulent as theoretically possible. (Lack of virulence of viruses has as much to do with differential survival of hosts as it has to do with differential survival of different strains of viruses.) I'm denying that the claimed general tendency is an invariant feature of all viruses.
