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Cancer Is An Evolutionary Mechanism To 'Autocorrect' Our Gene Pool, Suggests Paper (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Two scientists have come up with a depressing new hypothesis that attempts to explain why cancer is so hard to stop. Maybe, they suggest, cancer's not working against us. Maybe the disease is actually an evolutionary 'final checkpoint' that stops faulty DNA from being passed down to the next generation. To be clear, this is just a hypothesis. It hasn't been tested experimentally, and, more importantly, no one is suggesting that anyone should die of cancer. In fact, it's quite the opposite -- the researchers say that this line of thinking could help us to better understand the disease, and come up with more effective treatment strategies, like immunotherapy, even if a cure might not be possible. So let's step back a second here, because why are our bodies trying to kill us? The idea behind the paper is based on the fact that, in the healthy body, there are a whole range of inbuilt safeguards, or 'checkpoints,' that stop DNA mutations from being passed onto new cells. One of the most important of these checkpoints is apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Whenever DNA is damaged and can't be fixed, cells are marked for apoptosis, and are quickly digested by the immune system -- effectively 'swallowing' the problem. No mess, no fuss. But the new hypothesis suggests that when apoptosis -- and the other safeguards -- don't work like they're supposed to, cancer just might be the final 'checkpoint' that steps in and gets rid of the rogue cells before their DNA can be passed on... by, uh, killing us, and removing our genetic material from the gene pool.
Ducking cancer.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
of course these 'defective' genes get passed-on.. people usually have their kids before they get cancer. the only exception being the unfortunate kids who get sick young.
How does that explain post-menopausal cancers and cancer being more prevalent in individuals who are past their reproductive prime?
Yes, and with 7 billion of us on Space Ship Earth and 200000 more joining the party every day, it is a very effective mechanism....
If the theory was true, most cancers would have to occur before the peak of reproductive age, not after
Most cancers occur in later (post childbearing) years? This is according to the American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org/acs/grou...
I think it's always good to look at an problem from different perspectives and while thinking of cancer as an evolutionary protection against passing down defective genes is interesting, I'm not sure that it's a valid hypothesis.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Calling cancer a "checkpoint" suggests that it has a purpose. This in turn suggests a Designer. Evolution, on the other hand, suggests that life is simply a survival of the fittest in a sea of random chance. Are these scientists suggesting that they now believe evolution is driven by purpose?
You're assuming reproduction on a "human being" level, the cells in you are constantly replacing worn out and damaged cells.
Unfortunately, that strategy for limiting damage to the gene pool only works if you die before you've passed on your genes. What about someone who has had children, passed on their genes, then develops cancer and dies ? Now does nature benefit ?
As many have pointed out, if this were true, it would have to overwhelmingly affect the young, not the old. The opposite must be true: cancer exists because people died of everything else before cancer could begin to cause significant problems. Now we've mostly cured or mitigated all those other causes, cancer can happen because it's never previously been subjected to evolutionary pressure.
The part where this doesn't make sense is that our gametes don't have the cancerous genes, only the cancerous cells do. The rest of you is still you. Cancer doesn't change the cell structure of all your cells, just the cancerous ones. Your sperm or egg are still the same (unless you have ovarian/testicular cancer).
This article isn't science. It's a bullshit excuse for wealthy folks to feel genetically superior. In the meantime we can show scientifically that poor communities get the short end of the stick when it comes to the environment they live in. We pollute the shit out of parts of this country and that's why people get cancer at an alarming rate. You buy cheap toys for children laden with toxic chemicals and that causes cancer. Don't even get me started about the shit in water. The fire retardants on whatever you are sitting on causes cancer. Cancer isn't a depopulation mechanism.
I believe cancer is a result of humans drastically increasing the amount of entropy in our environment and that entropy finding its way into our bodies.
As others have pointed out the idea is flawed as it would require death to occur before childbearing. But would it not be evolutionarily advantageous to have a 'self-destruct' mechanism that deploys after having children when food and other resources might be scarce? Live just long enough to bear and raise children, but then die and cease consuming resources, leaving more for your offspring? If resources are rich, stress on the individual is low and cancer may be avoided. If resources are low and stress on the individual is high, cancer kicks in and removes consumers, leaving more resources and lessening stress on the next generation.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
"I believe cancer is a result of humans drastically increasing the amount of entropy in our environment and that entropy finding its way into our bodies." ..um, that isn't science either...
... it makes you turn orange.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm refusing treatment for anything other than skin cancer.
No thanks. Quality of life and burning cash reserves are both big deals to me.
My mother's body was so far gone she couldn't even donate it to science like she wanted to. All they could take were her eyes (she had a cataract fixed in one, but not the other).
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
But the new hypothesis suggests that when apoptosis -- and the other safeguards -- don't work like they're supposed to, cancer just might be the final 'checkpoint' that steps in and gets rid of the rogue cells before their DNA can be passed on... by, uh, killing us, and removing our genetic material from the gene pool.
Couldn't the exact same argument be made about suicide?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
What a miraculous poisonous world we have made for ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Many cancer tumors are caused by viruses, so no, this theory is not quite it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If cancer is autocorrect, it's very buggy and broken, as it most often doesn't correct the message until after it's already been sent. I could buy this idea if cancer killed most of its victims before they were able to procreate, but that's simply not the case.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The hypothesis is just plain stupid and take its roots in the idea the body or an intelligent design is making decisions about the ADN. This is a syncretism of two opposite ideas. The evoution is not intelligent and is not making conscious decisions, otherwise it is creationism and intelligent design. No wonder the hypothesis is not experimentally verified, it is flawn.
Achille Talon
Hop!
You and GP are both wrong. Cancer cells don't try to kill the host. What's happening is that they're doing what cells normally do -- dividing -- but the problem is they divide too quickly and aren't as functional as normal cells. This inadvertantly kills you because whatever organ they're attached to loses its function and even fails.
Take for example, if your heart has a big lump in a major chamber; it's going to have a hard time doing its job.
Every living multicellular organism on this planet gets cancer, including plants. It's never fatal for plants though, because cancer can't metastasize without blood, and they don't have any major organs that can fail.
Evolution requires the species propagate, longevity being a side effect of evolution. The longer we live the more genetic errors accumulate at the replication stage, leading to cancer. What we need is a new form of error correction mechanism that works at the DNA level.
Cancer is basically a result of faulty DNA copying - it happens when multiple anti-cancer systems fail in a cell. That's it. Ascribing it some kind of a purpose is pure teleological fallacy. Stuff doesn't need to happen "for a reason".
Cancer happens in cells that generally aren't germ-line cells, that is apart from testicular and ovarian cancers. (and many of those are stromal cells, not germ-line)
There's no evolutionary advantage in killing someone with bowel cancer. Those faulty genes wouldn't be passed on. It just doesn't make sense.
If cancer is designed to clean the gene pool of defects, it's failing, because cancer attacks middle-aged and old people, AFTER their genes have already been passed along. I might accept this for childhood cancers that MIGHT terminate that genetic sequence. But most 40+ year olds have already had children if they were going to.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the article seems to imply a pretty heavy intelligence behind evolution here.
Besides, if an organism develops genes that begin to trigger a "final solution" how do those genes get passed down to the next offspring (or the next, or the next, if procreation occurs before death)? Is cancer "smart" enough to self destruct an entire gene line? That's kind of the exact opposite of competition for survival with resources.
So cancer is just natures way to create the perfect healthy chernobylian chain smoking asbestos worker?
Except it happens too late for many. Most of the people I know who have had cancer have already reproduced at least once, often more than that. I dont see how this can be any kind of dna safeguard. I know of 5 people who have had cancer, the youngest at 35, the oldest at 80, and the other older than 40. All of them had reproduced as many times as they were likely to when it happened.
Smoking, chemical exposure and sunlight?
"increasing the amount of entropy in our environment and that entropy finding its way into our bodies." Dude, what does that even MEAN? Are you sure you know what "entropy" means, or did you just read that in Wired magazine and you started repeating it?
People die of cancers far more often these days because we already eliminated all the other ways to die. Now, we live longer and don't die at 45 from cholera, so we have to die SOMEhow. Cancer does a good job backstopping the goal. Blaming it on pollution is stupid, America is one of the cleanest countries in the world. But don't let facts get in the way of your emotional reaction. Entropy, LOL.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They are not claiming cancer is killing of the genetically inferior or people with inherently bad genes, they are saying cancer kills of people who's genes have been damaged, which is random and can happen to anybody, environments factors have an influence on the rate of cancer, but the increase in cancer rate is a consequence of longer live, the longer you live, the more times your cells have to divided, the more dice rolls for something to go wrong and cancer to occur.
Mutations that enhance the ability to make/sire babies in the short term but are actually deleterious in the long term will be preferred by evolution. For example storing fat in times of plenty lets one ride out cycles of famine/plenty. But the fats clogging the arteries eventually kill you, but by that time the body has made more babies.
Cancer is no more the "final checkpoint" "ultimate back stop" than heart disease or arthritis or lions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I believe cancer is a result of humans drastically increasing the amount of entropy in our environment and that entropy finding its way into our bodies.
This statement contains the most convoluted misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics that I have ever seen.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
"...cancer just might be the final 'checkpoint' that steps in and gets rid of the rogue cells before their DNA can be passed on..."
So why do the majority of cancers strike after one's childbearing years?
This article isn't science. It's a bullshit excuse for wealthy folks to feel genetically superior...
Or genetically ignorant.
Cancer in many cases does not pay attention to how large or small your wallet is. To provide a relevant example here, consider one of the wealthiest humans to ever walk the planet (Steve Jobs).
As for your other comments, I completely agree with you, so to an large extent cancer is a byproduct of your environment, so wealth does play a factor, especially in paying to treat it.
I had heard a theory some time ago that a perfectly healthy human body should not get cancer. We poison not only our environment but our food supply, which makes it rather unavoidable in many cases, and also rather impossible to validate that theory unless we move to another planet, or live in a bubble.
That said, our societies, governments, and even our planet is rather reliant on the current death toll, so solving this particular issue for the human population to reach the next billion plateau may ultimately cause more problems that it would solve. This is also the reason blatant killers like tobacco, alcohol, and even all-you-can-eat buffets that provide a turbo-charged vehicle to cancers, addictions, and heart disease are all legal in our society. The reality is we rely heavily on not only deaths caused by these top-tier killers, but also rely heavily on the profits created by our attempts to treat or cure them. Any profit measured in the trillions didn't get there by accident, and it certainly doesn't stay there for that reason either, which tends to question our true motivation to "cure" our current death toll.
If you were to ask Mother Earth what she thinks, her answer is simple. Humans are the cancer.
Interesting theory, but can't possibly work this way. Why? Because in order for this trait to benefit organism and its offspring one has to die and stop reproducing. This cuts your reproductive fitness by 100%, so no amount of benefit short of immortality would make up for such drawback.
... the backspace key.
People die of cancers far more often these days because we already eliminated all the other ways to die. Now, we live longer and don't die at 45 from cholera, so we have to die SOMEhow.
Repeat ten times and rinse! While I would add dementia, and probably some diseases we haven't found out about yet to the increasingly short list, the claim holds basically true. As we have largely eliminated other causes of death, something has to kill us.
I enjoy confusing people when I explain how decreasing the odds of dying from one disease, merely increases the odds of dying from most everything else.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Given that most cancers develop after a person's childbearing years.
I agree mostly, but calling America (the US?) one of the cleanest countries in the world is kinda misleading. It might be correct relatively, but on an absolute scale, we all drown in dirt.
And some of that dirt is probably very important for our immune system. Altogether too many people have become germophobes, and the results are not encouraging. Probably half of my son's hockey team was on inhalers when he was in high school. Weird food allergies have cropped up.
Our pediatrician was big on the idea that the immune system doesn't just happen, but needs to be helped along. When my son was around 4 years old, we started bringing him around our horse. He'd get these red blotches on himself. We took him to the pediatrician and he said let him be around the horse in increasing amounts of time, and not to be concerned unless he had issues breathing. We did just that, and within a week, no more blotches.
Not unlike noticing that peanut allergies hardly exist in the middle east, where peanuts and milk are often children's first solid food. As opposed to here where we were trying to eliminate peanuts from the earth. http://komonews.com/archive/st... .
Which doesn't work.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I believe cancer is a result of humans drastically increasing the amount of entropy in our environment and that entropy finding its way into our bodies.
This statement contains the most convoluted misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics that I have ever seen.
Even Homer Simpson knows that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The mutated DNA doesn't get passed along to descendants, unless it's in the gametes or their precursor cells.
Nah, saying, "Hold my beer and watch this," and getting killed in the process is nature's way of thinning the herd. Sadly, we have a monstrous tort system that's feeding the desire to save people from themselves only to breed more stupid people. And the tort bar ensures that they get lots of money for being stupid.
This hypothesis doesn't make much sense. In evolutionary terms passing on "faulty" genes is its own punishment. There's really no mechanism I can imagine that would select for cancer causing genes. I could see it if the mechanism was very ancient, from the time when cells were more colony than single organism.
Someone should tell these researchers that cancer isn't able to kill plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Another problem with this article is that it seems to say that "cancer" is a single disease. There are lots and lots of different cancers, so saying that "cancer" is some kind of unified mechanism is bizarre. There's not a lot of relationship between lung cancer and leukemia, except that both involve mutations and failed apoptosis.
Have you read my blog lately?
Is it? I always love to watch the old bond movies, and hear them talk about Free Radicals.
Now, entropy is a well defined word, and might be the wrong to use. Ineffective maybe? We digest ineffective food, and suffer in lifespan for it.
My thought is that cancer at its core is a bit error that is disabling apoptosis (cell suicide in response to its neighbors telling it to). Once a cell ignores apoptosis, all bets are off as to what that cell will do. It's free to reuse any genetic code that's available just like a virus can.
Consider that metastasis, the migration of cancer cells, is how we all got our start. After we were conceived, the fertilized egg migrated from a free floating organism in the fallopian tubes to attach itself to the uterine wall. Cancer uses those routines.
Once at the uterine wall, the fertilized egg sends out signals to the uterus to build a blood network to feed the egg. Cancer uses those routines.
The egg grows in an organized fashion into us. Perhaps because cancer has disabled apoptosis, it grows into a disorganized mess. Apoptosis is a pruning mechanism that keeps cells from varying too much from their neighbors. Sort of an HOA on steroids.
Consider that roughly 10^9 cells engage in cell divisions every day, that each cell has to copy around 10^9 base pairs which entails a huge number of parallel processes that have to coordinate during mitosis and it's amazing we don't all die from the errors that are bound to arise.
So basically our race and species, which society tells us we should care about over ourselves (you have to wonder why), is more important than our lives.
Anyway it can't be correct that cancer is needed to improve the gene pool. In fact eliminating anything from the gene pool a bad idea. Eliminating cells is fine because they are clones mostly. Apoptosis occurs in cells of which there are a trillion in duplicate. Ok let's say for example and hypothetically, someone (not me) may have a gene for trolling on slashdot, which you may find annoying and want to eliminate. But what if they also have a gene that is useful in an upcoming robot war? You can't write off an entire genome because of a few bad genes. Eliminating a entire organism is very different than strategically than eliminating a single cell.
Anyway this is a moot point, we have the technology now to edit and fix bad genes.
Eliminating genes from the gene pool should only be done as a last resort. Many people who get cancer are intelligent, useful, and productive members of society. Cancer doesn't target the people who are no good for the tribe. Therefore, it makes no sense evolutionarily for cancer to be a useful weeding process. Cancer itself is the result of bad genes, it doesn't result in death because evolution is helped by it.
Why is this ot nonsense getting upvoted nowadays?
At this point most people already passed on their DNA. No use "checkpointing" after that moment.
Possibly, but I kind of doubt it. I think it's more a result of the complexities of our cells breaking down at some point, and is an inevitable part of cellular reproduction. When you think about it, your cells reproduce quickly and often, and very rarely become cancerous. It's a amazing that things don't go wrong more often.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
People generally die of cancer decades after they passed on their genes.
How can it affect evolution, when most people get cancer when they are old and past their prime reproductive years? The damage has been done by then. Silly.
Has cancer ever come from a precursor to an egg or sperm cells? In women at least all egg cells have already been produced by the time they are born.
Cancer occurs through out the body in cells which do not propagate to future generations.
At best you can have evolutionary pressure which kills people predisposed to developing terminal cancer. In other words they have a flawed immune system with trouble naturally identifying and eliminating certain cancers. Basically this would be a birth defect of ones cancer immune system.
But cancer is ultimately a runaway process. Everyone will develop it sooner or later depending on how long they live. Our bodies produce at least six cancerous cells a day. The body has the tough problem of identifying them before they get out of hand. The mutations that accumulate naturally are distinct from the mutations that occur in germ lines.
I'm not even American, and I know enough that unless you vote in one of the few swing States, you should vote 3rd party, if only as a protest, compared to not voting or throwing your vote away on the loser.
Politicians do notice 3rd party votes and take their issues into consideration and if nothing else you can say that 60% of American voted against Trump/Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
While you make a very good point, there are lots of substances that we don't get immune to, things like lead along with many more new substances that we haven't evolved to deal with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
2 of the 5 gays that I know well have children. What you do for fun is almost completely unrelated to whether you want to have children or not.
Equally, many of the straights I know don't have children. Who would?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's not how it worked. When the bird stopped singing, or made any signs of distress was when it was time to leave, taking the living bird with you. The bird was your work party's way of determining that you need to go along this way instead of that cross-way to work your way around where ever the source of the asphyxiating gas is. The threats for which you used a canary were "coal damp" (carbon dioxide, which would suffocate the canary before it suffocated the miners) and "fire damp" (mostly methane), which is a mild anaesthetic at levels below those that it would propagate flame from the miner's candles for lighting. Particularly in the latter case, you needed to watch the LIVE canary very carefully to avoid going from a 2% methane atmosphere (flame does not propagate) to a 4.5% methane atmosphere - which is almost at the lower explosive limit of methane in air, and you're on the verge of triggering a fire damp explosion and dieing.
When Davy invented the "miner's safety lamp" in 1815, it would address the fire damp (CH4) issue, but would give no warning against the coal damp (CO2) issue, so the canary was still needed.
Sorry - spent too many years of my life dealing with industrial hazards of working in flammable or explosive atmospheres. Canaries in coal mines are more complex than most people think, rather like the hundreds of diseases lumped together as "cancer".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Except that the experiment has been done. Several hundred million years before humans evolved, but that's no reason to not use the information available.
It is fairly well known that the non-fish gnathostome vertebrates (elasmobranchs, a.k.a. sharks and rays ; humans, birds and frogs are al indistinguishable from the rest of the fish at this level of classification) do not suffer from cancer. Which tells us one of two things - either our knowledge of the biology of elasmobranchs is seriously lacking (quite plausible, with an obvious path for further research), or the differences between the elasmobranch immune and/ or developmental control system and the corresponding systems of fishes (including humans) are ripe targets for understanding hw things go wrong in human tumours.
I'm taking it that the several hundred diseases lumped as "cancer" are in large part failures of the control systems inherent in differentiation, growth and control of tissues - including their death.
Personally, I suspect that the (several hundred) "cure(s) for cancer" will be found some time after we have fusion power on an industrial scale.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Potassium, nicotine, petrol (gasoline), fluorine, mercury fulminate, ammonia bleach, excess H2O, uranium hexafluoride, 10%+ CO2 in the atmosphere, .. and about a million others..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
We'd die pretty quick with no potassium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Apropos when used in context for society's 'cancers' - like those politicians we love to hate so much!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
The problem with this theory is that most cancer cases happen after reproductive age. They may have some negative effect on the survival of offspring by denying them the support of parents and grandparents, but the offspring have already been born. It would explain leukemia (which is not uncommon in childhood), but does less to explain breast cancer (which mostly strikes at age 40 and above, past the prime reproductive years) or prostate cancer (mostly an old age disease).
Oops yes very vital, but some potassium salts are extremely toxic. In the wrong place or the wrong compound potentially lethal - potassium hydroxide, potassium chloride, potassium cyanide.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..