What is the evolutionary history of cancer?

:shrug:

cancer isn't an organism....but it may have something to do with the enzyme telomerase...which gives cells a finite lifespan....

get carried along in the gene pool... do we have any way of knowing how long its been around?

If you are expecting something as complex as DNA replication to go perfectly every time for every complex organism on earth...

a small mutation sends normal processes into full blown fuck up mode. Like a copy machine...circuit gets fried and it keeps making more copies. Which is what its supposed to do...but it just stops. If you get rid of the copying ability, the copy machine is useless.

Same thing with cancer-prone genes. You get rid of the function that makes them susceptible to cancer, you also get rid of the function that is adaptive and useful.

I assume that there are some cancers which are caused by exposure to carcinogens alone. But many seem to run in families.

:shrug:

... so most people died long before they developed cancer.


... so we've not had a long enough time to evolve away from having it. Natural Selection wouldn't have selected for humans with a lower incidence of cancer, because most humans died of other causes before getting cancer.


It is said that EVERY man on the planet will get prostate cancer if he lives long enough. The thing is, most of us men die long before we get it.

whether you were an African bushman, a European of the Middle Ages, a denizen of classical China, etc. etc. --

Something happened, mostly over the 19th century, first in north-west Europe, as a result of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, that took that 33-years-old standard up to 55 by 1910, and into the 70s by the mid-20th century --

Makes one start to value things like the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, Reason, Science, the Enlightenment (etc. etc.) -- the very reasons why the very concept of "progressivism" makes sense (rather than some of our brothers and sisters today who want to deny all that progress, and who tend to relapse into "noble savage" reveries....)

:hide: "It is what it is."

We may progress ourselves into destroying the planet.

unless you were disabled, and you died a lot younger than that. And life was a constant struggle for survival in a harsh realm, where men dominated (just because they had the brute force) -- where no one could study, learn or even read. Where people trembled in the face of the forces of nature, and invented beliefs in harsh and cruel gods. Where humanity, essentially, lived as animals, red in tooth and claw ----

Either you're a hopeless Rousseauian-romantic throwback, or, more likely, you are a misanthropic animal lover with (ahem, puke, ahem) "fur-babies."

Go ahead and tell us next about how you'd save a dog rather than a human being if it came down to it (because you love your dog, and you hate a lot of people.)

I was just stating a fact - overpopulation is harming the planet.

country was infectious diseases like typhoid, TB, diphtheria, flu, etc. It wasn't until the 1920's that we begin to see heart disease and cancer rise to the top of list. Heart diseases are still number one with cancer second.

lot of really different diseases. But cancer in tumor form is often cells which reproduce endlessly, the normal mechanisms which limit the number of times cells can reproduce gets turned off somehow, and those cells become the cancer.

There are lots and lots of different causes for specific cancers, and it's probably been around forever. Keep in mind that it's only relatively recently that there have been good and accurate ways to diagnose very many diseases, and most cancers would simply have killed people before anyone knew what was really going on.

and that could cover many conditions.

in and of itself, it's just a description of how cells refuse to operate the way they did originally. It isn't evolution, it's malfunction.

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:shrug:

Is this a real question?