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.

Comments

dumbest thing i've seen all week.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:dumbest thing i've seen all week.

[Kjella]

I might be convinced that it's somehow earth's method of population control, that if lifespans are shortened so the overall population is more manageable or something along those lines;

Doesn't really work that way, if people reproduce at 30 and die at 50 or 100 or 200 that only adds a constant factor to the total population. It might lead to one-time "fill-up" effects where new children are born and old people die later because of longer lifespan adjusting that factor, but the only long term control on population is the reproduction rate. And during reproductive growth the young outnumber the old simply because there's more in this generation than in the last.

This is why people are no longer so extremely worried about population explosion, birth rates are way down and trending down but due to an aging population and advances in healthcare we will become closer to 10 billion. Europe and North America is below replacement fertility but still growing because of this, Asia and Latin American spot on, Oceania slightly above and then there's Africa which is still way high but below the world average from 1950-1970.

High reproduction is also related to extreme poverty, basically if you need many children to support you when you grow older it is "necessary" to have many. Sure most people still like to have kids but only a few and not a whole bunch. China and India seem to be pulling people out of extreme poverty quite quick, so I think they're moving into "safer" territory there. Africa is again challenging, you have countries like Nigera still in explosive growth and GDP per capita barely increasing, only 60% of the population is even literate.

That said, they're seeing a communications revolution in the last decade in Africa, from almost nobody having a cell phone almost everyone has one, smartphone penetration is low but not absent. I think that'll have a big effect on education and literacy but it'll take a few decades to really show net results. With the exception of certain retards in the Middle East that want to bring us back to the Dark Ages, things are actually progressing quite well. A bit worried about mass surveillance and authoritarian states, but not overpopulation and lack of basic necessities.

Old People

[Ann Coulter]

How does that explain post-menopausal cancers and cancer being more prevalent in individuals who are past their reproductive prime?

The problem with this hypothesis is that...

[mykepredko]

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.

Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism

[WarJolt]

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.

Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism

[mjm1231]

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.

Re: Autocorrect?

[Kjella]

We have evidence that ordinary cells have a finite number of divisions due to telomeres, but we also know there's an enzyme called telomerase that can extend them. This remains active in egg and sperm cells so we can continue to go on as a species forever and for normal life spans there's enough divisions in ordinary cells. In the lab, we've extended normal cells' lifetime way past their ordinary limit with telomerase. So why don't we have immortal cells by default? It's probably a fail safe, if a cell starts reproducing extremely fast without working around this limit it'll fizzle and become little more than a harmless lump.

There's some indications that as we push for 100+ year lifespans we might be running out of divisions leading to among other things a weaker immune system because we lack white blood cells. It might be that we will develop telomere extension therapy to give us a few more regenerations (hello Dr. Who), but as you can probably tell the main problem today is that cells start dividing like crazy, not that they stop dividing. And if we made all cells immortal with genetic manipulation, all it'd take is one cell short circuiting the reproduction speed to cause cancer and kill the host. So if we want natural immortality we need to find a way to stop that first or we'll all die of cancer instead of aging.

Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism

[Ol Olsoc]

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.