Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the virus seeks to replicate" variants of the virus that caused their hosts to socialize more replicated more
Kind of a tangent, but the way you phrased it, while much more technically correct, is totally roundabout and unnatural to a native English speaker. I've often postulated that the necessity of a Subject in English sentences causes us to inadvertently project agency in our descriptions of events / phenomena that in reality don't have an "actor" in a meaningful sense. It's fascinating to consider to what extent this fa…
"host-sociability-enhancing variants replicated more"