Cancer Is An Evolutionary Mechanism To 'Autocorrect' Our Gene Pool, Suggests Paper (sciencealert.com) 262
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.
Autocorrect? (Score:3)
Ducking cancer.
Re: Autocorrect? (Score:2)
It always struck me as strange when I hear that cancer cells don't really die. It's as if cancer cells are evolution working to fix one problem (cell death), and creating another (cells not functioning). I wonder if one day some cancerous cells will evolve to function. Imagine having a cancer in your lungs that efficiently pass oxygen, or a brain tumor that functions like brain matter. It's our bodies trying
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Re: Autocorrect? (Score:2)
It tends to be that the more dangerous cancers are more fully functional. For example, being telomerase positive.
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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.
Re: Autocorrect? (Score:2)
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An evolutionary cancer that gives everyone super regenerative capabilities...
Please continue with this plotline.
Re: Autocorrect? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [the-scientist.com] 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.
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Cancer creeps up on us where we do the most damage. Smoke a cigarette? Damage to lungs, make cells immortal. Irradiate the skin in tanning beds? Damage to skin cells, make skin immortal. Eat terrible diet? Stomach or colon cancer, make cells immortal. Maybe our bodies just havnt figured out how to make the immortal cells function.
While your hypothesis serves the "all of your illness are belong to you" outlook, where people have been convinced that skipping sunscreen and getting 1 sunburn will kill them, way too much cancer is genetically driven.
As well, there is a big gaping hole in the scientists hypothesis. Most cancer occurs well beyond the childbearing and child raising years. So if it is an "autocorrect "function that improves the genetic stock of a species, it is a really crappy one.
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That's why I always turn autocorect off. Maybe I'll make a misstake or two, but at least I won't get cancer.
dumbest thing i've seen all week. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
I came to say the same thing; generally speaking the genes are being passed on before cancer takes its toll. 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; but not in any shape or form of stopping "faulty DNA from being passed down to the next generation".
Re:dumbest thing i've seen all week. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [worldometers.info] still in explosive growth and GDP per capita barely [tradingeconomics.com] increasing, only 60% of the population is even literate.
That said, they're seeing a communications revolution [pewglobal.org] 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.
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it must be said that the human population has outstripped the resources and as such a massive correction will eventually restore the natural balance.
Indeed. Just look at the massive human die-offs that happened when we stopped using whale oil and buggy whips.
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Not at all. I simply think it's a manifestation of the cancer that's eating humanity. The question is, are you manifesting th lesser version, where you spread cancerous memes merely to get a thrill from the response, or have they taken actual hold over your mind and now control you, like they did the Orlando shooter, Breivik, or that assassin in Britain?
Maybe you
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Takes its toll?
2016 Fort McMurray wildfire [wikipedia.org]
By May 1st your genes are toxic. No toll.
By May 3rd your home burns down. Toll.
Edge Master Class 2010: W. DANIEL HILLIS ON "CA [edge.org]
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This misses so many points. Though I am too lazy to check if TFA explains their thought process.
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Dropped in to say the same thing, found your post to agree with instead.
Cancer mostly happens to older people. Past child-bearing years. So the genes were passed on long before the cancer could act to remove the bad genes from the gene pool.
IOW, stupid hypothesis.
Old People (Score:5, Insightful)
How does that explain post-menopausal cancers and cancer being more prevalent in individuals who are past their reproductive prime?
Re:Old People (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution explains cancers past reproductive prime, good enough to breed, good enough to survive, that's just the way it is. Being the best does not mean survival, the low numbers and random chance guarantee that, numbers are just against it (when you are in the minority, low numbers means, insect bites, random predators, infections and clumsiness, takes all equally and so low numbers increases the odds of disappearance of traits, no matter how positive. Evolution just demands those least able to reproduce die out, this then shifts the average and the species evolves. Significant mutation tends to require a vacancy in the localised ecology to survive. something that allows low numbers to reproduce quickly. So cancers tend to occur post prime reproductive age because it makes little difference. Of course that does not take into account lead addled fuckwits toxifying our environment and giving cancers to younger persons than would be normal, that is also evolution, an entire species dying out due to, hmm, greed driven stupidity.
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Post-menopausal doesn't enter into it. The human female develops all the ova she will have available for reproduction by around the 20th week of gestation. I.e., before she is born. (I imagine to the Catholic church, aborting a female fetus is like killing two generations at once.)
Evolution, for the most part, doesn't give a shit what happens to you after 40.
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Re: Old People (Score:2)
No. 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).
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How does that explain post-menopausal cancers and cancer being more prevalent in individuals who are past their reproductive prime?
Because we're no longer necessary for the species to procreate....
That would explain why were haven't evolved immunity to it. The paper here suggested we evolved cancer as mechanism correcting who reproduces, and that seems incompatible with it mostly affecting non reproducing people.
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We're still useful in a social sense. Grandparents can perform childcare while the parents hunt/forage.
There's a theory that there's selection for homosexuality because gay uncles and aunts provide extra child nurturing.
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Well of course, what stupid, bigoted, uneducated moron would?
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Oh, yeah, good one. You've really blown the theory (which I was merely repeating, by the way) out of the water with that insightful collection of statistics and evidence and...
Oop, no, wait a minute, you didn't.
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I tagged the story "unintelligent design", then saw this. :)
The problem with this hypothesis is that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most cancers occur in later (post childbearing) years? This is according to the American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org/acs/grou... [cancer.org]
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.
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Erm, exactly.
As a so-called "final checkpoint" it fail utterly. It's like a 70 years old trying to win a Darwin Award in front of his grand-children.
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Would it really matter if the system stays active AFTER child bearing years if it does its job during those years correctly? The only negative I can think of is that you might not have as many helpers and teachers and carers.
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Purpose (Score:3)
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?
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Evolutionary traits have some pretty clear purposes. The way we grow old and die evolved. It's easy to say there is no purpose to life in a philosophical way, and maybe that's true, but it's also easy to identify the purpose for so many evolved traits.
Evolution is random chance through random mutation, followed by natural selection. Selection is even purposeful in creatures that have brains.
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No, they're using 'purpose' in the sense of an adaptive function.
Just like they always have. It's never caused confusion before, at least not for people acting in good faith.
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Exactly. Good for the individual isn't always good for the herd, and good for the herd isn't always good for the individual, for survival of the herd.
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No, he's spot on.
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I've quite possibly written some of your textbooks. :-)
Dumbest hypothesis ever (Score:2)
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That's ridiculous. Older people have had a much longer period of time to have their genes mutated than young people.
The hypothesis doesn't say it's selecting a trait or gene (intelligently or otherwise), it's saying when a crap random mutation happens in some single cell, and the normal mitigating factors to deal with the broken cell fail, the last fail safe is to kill the whole colony/organism to prevent the spread of that broken gene through the herd. I can't even see why that's controversial, it makes se
Re:Dumbest hypothesis ever (Score:4, Insightful)
If most cancers happen past reproductive age, why is there any need to "prevent" the spread of genes that won't be spread anyhow? And most forms of cancer are due to random mutations in individual cells, which won't change the genes in sperm/eggs. The few cancers that are due to genetic susceptibility (such as some forms of breast cancer) still get passed on anyhow. The hypothesis is so easily refuted that it isn't even funny.
What GP post says should be obvious. We get cancer specifically because there is no evolutionary pressure after reproduction for us to not get it.
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First, the broken gene isn't going anywhere unless it happens to be in your reproductive track. Second, if the reason the gene is "broken" is that it causes cancer, and the reason it causes cancer is to filter out "broken" genes, it would seem that a population without
Mechanism to Preserve Resources for Offspring? (Score:2)
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apoptosis ... (Score:2)
... it makes you turn orange.
After watching my mother deal with it... (Score:2)
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).
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After watching my mother die from untreated cancer, I can assure you that you will have no quality of life by refusing treatment.
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DNA-induced Suicide (Score:2)
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?
Enviroment (Score:3)
What a miraculous poisonous world we have made for ourselves.
Viruses (Score:2)
Ineffective autocorrect... (Score:2)
Stupidest hypothesis ever (Score:2)
What a BS... (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't make sense (Score:2)
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.
Cancer as Final Genetic Screening? Nope! (Score:2)
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.
Sure so evolution is against (Score:2)
Smoking, chemical exposure and sunlight?
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Cancer is on the blind side of evolution. (Score:2)
Mutations that enhance the ability to make/sire babies in the short term but are actually deleterious in the long term will be pr
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The claim is not tenable. Evolution can filter out deleterious mutations that affect the ability to reproduce. Mutations that happen after the body loses ability to bear or sire babies will not be filtered out. .
That is the best point made on this topic. Cancers are by far more common late in life, after reproductive years are pretty much over. An evolutionary change mechanism would need to occur earlier in life.
And, btw, since we are living longer, we'll see more cancer cases.
I see a flaw in the reasonibg" (Score:2)
"...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?
Humans are the cancer. (Score:2)
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 ultimat
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I had heard a theory some time ago that a perfectly healthy human body should not get cancer.
Since there is not, and never will be, a perfectly healthy human body in existence, we won't be able to test that theory.
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what nonsense, people are living longer now than ever. The benefit of using "those poisons" far outweigh the negatives.
The big risk factor for cancer? aging. being 65 or over.
And what is this stupidity about the mostly molten rock called Earth having opinion about humans? If you think people are so bad, kill yourself. We won't miss you.
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what nonsense, people are living longer now than ever. The benefit of using "those poisons" far outweigh the negatives. The big risk factor for cancer? aging. being 65 or over.
And what is this stupidity about the mostly molten rock called Earth having opinion about humans? If you think people are so bad, kill yourself. We won't miss you.
People are living longer because of medical advancements such as vaccines and antibiotics. Otherwise, we would still be dying from getting a scratch infected as humans were 150 years ago. This does not dismiss the poisons that have been introduced into society (artificial sugars, HFCS, etc.) that contribute to many medical conditions, with the most obvious one being the obesity epidemic. As I pointed out, we're in no hurry to cure ourselves of these man-made problems, because of the massive profits and j
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so the benefits outweigh the negatives, as I said.
man is free to use the resources of earth as he sees fit, nothing immoral about it.
Earth is a non-living giant rock with extremely thin layer of biosphere on it. The biosphere isn't a single organism and doesn't act like one. Your stupid romantic greenie bullshit doesn't correspond to reality.
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so the benefits outweigh the negatives, as I said.
man is free to use the resources of earth as he sees fit, nothing immoral about it.
Earth is a non-living giant rock with extremely thin layer of biosphere on it. The biosphere isn't a single organism and doesn't act like one. Your stupid romantic greenie bullshit doesn't correspond to reality.
Speaking of bullshit, perhaps you review history about the people of Pompeii to see how "non-living" our planet is. The inhabitants were all killed by a volcano (Mount Vesuvius)
Or perhaps you should go interview the survivors of New Orleans about our "biosphere" that took 1800 lives in 2005 due to a hurricane (Katrina)
That "mostly molten" state you speak of took over 200,000 lives in 2004 when an earthquake triggered a series of tsunamis.
The ozone layer around our planet that used to be consistent in prote
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what nonsense, people are living longer now than ever. The benefit of using "those poisons" far outweigh the negatives. The big risk factor for cancer? aging. being 65 or over.
And what is this stupidity about the mostly molten rock called Earth having opinion about humans? If you think people are so bad, kill yourself. We won't miss you.
People are living longer because of medical advancements such as vaccines and antibiotics. Otherwise, we would still be dying from getting a scratch infected as humans were 150 years ago. This does not dismiss the poisons that have been introduced into society (artificial sugars, HFCS, etc.) that contribute to many medical conditions, with the most obvious one being the obesity epidemic. As I pointed out, we're in no hurry to cure ourselves of these man-made problems, because of the massive profits and jobs they create.
The relevance to Earth is that our planet is every bit a living organism as we are, so stop with the ignorance already.
Actually the big precursors to the population explosion was access to clean water, and regular hand washing.. antibiotics and medicare had a much smaller effect later on. So easy to forget these things... It is even easy for doctors to forget that as is evidenced by infection rates in hospitals being higher than other places in the first world.
You bring a strong point here, and thank you for pointing that out, but I also mentioned vaccines. That advancement didn't exactly result in tiny numbers of lives being saved, as we would probably be a few billion less in total population without them.
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If we go by Gaia hypothesis then humans are simply "Mother Earth" finally developing a central nervous system, which is currently in the process of booting up. While it's chaotic and unpleasant the alternative is Earth getting scorched by the Sun as it slowly runs out of nuclear fuel. So how about knocking out this melodramatic "humans are cancer" meme and treating this era as what it is: Earth's akward teenage yea
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If we go by Gaia hypothesis then humans are simply "Mother Earth" finally developing a central nervous system, which is currently in the process of booting up. While it's chaotic and unpleasant the alternative is Earth getting scorched by the Sun as it slowly runs out of nuclear fuel. So how about knocking out this melodramatic "humans are cancer" meme and treating this era as what it is: Earth's akward teenage years?
In 2004, an earthquake triggered a series of tsunamis that killed over 200,000 people. I suppose we'll just label that "growing pains".
In the meantime, humans are getting scorched from the damage they caused to the ozone layer. I would point out the evidence as to how we are a cancer when flying over the most populated cities on the planet, if I could see the fucking thing through all the man-made smog hovering over it.
It's not hard to find evidence that the Earth is going through cycles. Cycles that las
Interesting theory, but can't possibly work (Score:2)
Not autocorrect ... (Score:2)
Seems unlikely... (Score:2)
Given that most cancers develop after a person's childbearing years.
Sounds Unlikely (Score:2)
That's the job of stupid behavior (Score:2)
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.
Just off the top of my head... (Score:2)
Evolutionary Intent vs Random Accidents (Score:2)
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, exc
A simpler idea (Score:2)
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 ut
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That's true for several dozen types of cancer - maybe 3 to 5% of the total. Most apoptosis is a cell destroying itself (by flooding itself with poisonous destructive oxy--gen processing chemicals from the mitochondria) in response to internal cues, not due to interaction with neighbors. Sometimes it's a "quorum" decision as you suggest, but that's relatively rare AIUI.
Dumb (Score:2)
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 sl
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We have tools to do it. Whether we have enough knowledge to do it safely, particularly since biochemistry is an extremely complex network, is a different, but probably more important question.
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Doesn't quite make sence (Score:2)
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
Re: Stupid stupid stupid (Score:2)
Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"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 pollut
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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.
Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [komonews.com] .
Which doesn't work.
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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.
Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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?... [youtube.com]
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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.
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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.
Re: Cancer as a mechanism for Darwinism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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... [slashdot.org]
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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?
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(Yes, there are other things that cause galls. But cancer-like mutations are one of the causes of these symptoms.)
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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 su