A fascinating and short article capturing some of the cellular and evolutionary aspects of cancer, and how cancer is an evolutionary throwback to earlier, single-celled organisms. Others are more qualified to comment on the merits of this hypothesis and treatment applications. Quote:
Charles Lineweaver, of the Australian National University, and I [Paul Davies] have proposed a theory of cancer based on its ancient evolutionary roots. We think that as cancer progresses in the body it reverses, in a speeded-up manner, the arrow of evolutionary time. Increasing deregulation prompts cancer cells to revert to ever earlier genetic pathways that recapitulate successively earlier ancestral life styles. We predict that the various hallmarks of cancer progression will systematically correlate with the activation of progressively older ancestral genes. The most advanced and malignant cancers recreate aspects of life on Earth before a billion years ago.
Update: The detailed takedown of this theory, provided by the ever reliable Explorable, can be found below:
Scientists shouldn’t be looking for optimism, they should be searching for the truth, which is sometimes going to be grim. So what if the ‘internal Darwinism’ model implies an intimidating number of possibilities? It is what it is. Every cancer is different, every cancer is complicated, and waving your hands and pretending that there is an ancestrally-derived unity of mechanisms under every single cancer doesn’t make it so. Davies and Lineweaver are going to have to do better than parading decades-old evolutionary misconceptions at me to persuade me of their case.