You can come up with just so evolutionary stories as to why a particular trait might or might not be adaptive, and therefore might or might not be selected for, for just about anything.

The specific example he gave of rabbit hemorrhagic fever virus is pretty much like a rabbit version of Ebola virus in terms of symptoms.

It was released in Australia in the mid-1990s, and rabbits have been co-evolving with it since then. This study captured wild rabbits in 2007 (meaning their ancestors had been subject to periodic outbreaks for over a decade and therefore could reasonably be anticipated to have evolved some amount of resistance, if resistance is possible), bred them a few times to get 80 rabbits, and then exposed those 80 rabbits to four different variants of the virus: the original isolate released in the mid-90s, and isolates collected in 2006, 2007, and 2009.

What they found was that, in these rabbits, the newest virus samples are considerably more deadly and also killed the rabbits considerably more quickly.

The original virus killed about 70% of all the rabbits they exposed to it, with an average survival time of about 120 +- 20 hours. The 2006 sample killed 85% with a survival time of 80 +- 16 hours, the 2007 killed 100% with a survival time of 45 +- 2.5 hours and the 2009 also killed 100% in 50 +- 3.5 hours.

Compared to the effects of the original virus on the original wild rabbit population, the authors cite an earlier study that found:

>Cooke and Berman (2000) showed that CAPM V-351 killed 22 of 24 unselected, nonresistant Australian wild rabbits, with survival times averaging 72.5 hr for orally inoculated rabbits (and BDC, pers comm.).

It seems clear that the wild rabbits did begin evolving resistance to the original strain of the virus, because although the original strain of the virus is still very deadly among wild rabbits, it's not quite as deadly. But it also seems clear that the viral evolution has caused it to maintain, at the very least, the same level of virulence as it had before it began coevolving, and perhaps an even higher virulence. There is certainly no evidence that after 30+ generations of rabbits the virus has reached a much less deadly equilibrium with the rabbits compared to its original virulence.

As far as just so stories go, I don't find any story that HIV would certainly naturally tend to become less virulent to be convincing. Even in completely untreated HIV, the latency time between infection and observable, behaviorally affecting significant illness is months to years.

So you have a disease that without modern medicine, looks like many other apparently random diseases that just occasionally kill people. After all, it isn't HIV that kills. It's opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. We have been able to identify a relatively small number of characteristic illnesses that pop up in modern society almost entirely among those who are immunosuppressed because of HIV, but that doesn't mean those illnesses would also be characteristic in a pre-modern society, and it doesn't mean anybody would have the widespread health surveillance to identify them.

In addition to that, the most common transmission method of an HIV infection is sex, and (both currently and historically) sex is something that humans like to engage in, and engage in quite frequently on average.

The point of all that is that, if you think HIV would evolve to become less virulent because virulence impedes transmission, you should consider that, other than the terminal phase, it doesn't impede transmission, and the number of possible transmission events between infection and symptomatic illness is, for many people, in the dozens to hundreds, or more. That means that even if it kills 100% of people in 5 years, it's never going to run out of people to kill until everybody's dead -- unless you have modern epidemiology that can identify there's some kind of infection and what the method of transmission is and what effective preventive methods are, and/or you can at least identify HIV infection as a specific illness and have effective medication to treat it.