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.

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.