Evolutionary Foundations For Cancer Biology

Abstract

New applications of evolutionary biology are transforming our understanding of cancer. The articles in this special issue provide many specific examples, such as microorganisms inducing cancers, the significance of within-tumor heterogeneity, and the possibility that lower dose chemotherapy may sometimes promote longer survival. Underlying these specific advances is a large-scale transformation, as cancer research incorporates evolutionary methods into its toolkit, and asks new evolutionary questions about why we are vulnerable to cancer. Evolution explains why cancer exists at all, how neoplasms grow, why cancer is remarkably rare, and why it occurs despite powerful cancer suppression mechanisms. Cancer exists because of somatic selection; mutations in somatic cells result in some dividing faster than others, in some cases generating neoplasms. Neoplasms grow, or do not, in complex cellular ecosystems. Cancer is relatively rare because of natural selection; our genomes were derived disproportionally from individuals with effective mechanisms for suppressing cancer. Cancer occurs nonetheless for the same six evolutionary reasons that explain why we remain vulnerable to other diseases. These four principles—cancers evolve by somatic selection, neoplasms grow in complex ecosystems, natural selection has shaped powerful cancer defenses, and the limitations of those defenses have evolutionary explanations—provide a foundation for understanding, preventing, and treating cancer.

Conclusion

The benefits of using evolutionary principles to understand cancer provide a specific example of the benefits of evolutionary medicine more generally. An evolutionary approach can help us understand why cancer exists and how it progresses (somatic evolution), how cancer cells interact with environments (ecological approaches), why it is not more common (natural selection for cancer suppression mechanisms), and why cancer suppression mechanisms can never be perfect (constraints, trade-offs, and other evolutionary reasons for vulnerability to disease). Evolution is essential for understanding cancer. It provides a framework for studying the evolutionary origins and progression of cancer that is parallel and complementary to the Hallmarks of Cancer framework for studying the mechanisms of cancer.

The importance of an evolutionary understanding cancer is not just an academic pursuit; it has great clinical utility that remains largely untapped. Evolutionary theory and methods have led to critical advances that promise to improve how we understand and treat cancer. For example, the finding that diversity in the premalignant biopsies predicts progression to cancer (Maley et al. 2006; Merlo et al. 2010) suggests methods for risk stratification, and a focus of clinical resources on those patients with the highest likelihood of cancer progression. Also, the development of novel therapeutic approaches, such as Gatenby's adaptive therapy algorithm (Gatenby et al. 2009), holds the promise of revolutionizing the way some cancers are treated—shifting the focus from eliminating every cancer cell, to controlling cancer by manipulating selection forces within the tumor. An evolutionary analysis of chemotherapy resistance suggests that taking another biopsy after a relapse may identify resistant mutations and guide targeted second line therapies. Finally, a clearer understanding of how large organisms suppress cancer (Caulin and Maley 2011), and the trade-offs inherent in cancer suppression, will inspire new strategies for risk assessment and cancer prevention. An example is provided by Hochberg et al.'s (this issue) discussion of new strategies to limit or eradicate incipient neoplasms by reducing microinflammation which may spur neoplastic progression, and by reducing the accumulation of DNA damage by administering poly ADP ribose polymerase inhibitors.

In retrospect, it is remarkable that the evolution of cells within tumors was not recognized until the 1970s with Nowell's (1976) paper ‘The clonal evolution of tumor cell populations.’ Despite subsequent wide acceptance of evolutionary explanations for cancer progression, applications of evolutionary thinking remain limited; for instance, evolutionary terms are used in only about 1% of the abstracts of papers on therapeutic resistance (Aktipis et al. 2011). While applications of evolutionary principles to the problems of cancer are in their infancy, they are growing fast, as illustrated by many recent conferences across the world, and the creation of two centers for the study of evolution and cancer, the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Cancer Research at University of Montpellier. We anticipate that evolutionary applications that advance cancer research and treatment will speed the growth of evolutionary medicine more generally, and that as more physicians have opportunities to learn the basic science of evolutionary biology, their insights will further advance our understanding of cancer, as well as the rest of medicine.

- Full paper here

Reasons Experts Should Not Debate Nonexperts

• Science and scholarship do not advance via public debate.
• Expertise on a subject matter is not necessarily correlated with rhetorical ability.
• Knowingly are unknowingly, in debates debaters frequently end up making logically, causally, or statistically flawed arguments that still sound good.
• There are a variety of rhetorical techniques that persuade without proving.
• Public debate rewards people who are willing to say anything.
• Confidence and certainty win debates while expertise is all about qualifying and hedging.
• A debate implies a winner and a loser.
• Experts can’t defeat nonexpert “spreads.”
• Such a debate implies that the nonexpert is on par with the expert on the subject of the debate.
• A public debate implies that nonexpert members of the public are competent judges of that debate.

- Brilliant piece here 

I would also add: 

1. Science is based on probability,  marginal improvements and so many nuances - its not binary. 

2. Humans are born to argue; its ludicrous to argue with someone who doesn't known rudimentary elements of the subject. 

3. Motivated reasoning. 

4. Lack of epistemological humility. 

5. Lack of gratitude for how far we have come as a species and how much luxuries we have. 

6. Sheer waste of time and energy which could be used productively. 

The Secrets to Evolutionary Success

There may be a lot of traits that exist for no good reason at all.

We know examples from the wild too. There are subterranean caves that have been completely closed off from the outside world for millions of years. And when people went into those caves and sampled bacteria that had never been in touch with human civilization, they found that these bacteria were resistant against multiple antibiotics. And some of these antibiotics are not natural molecules — they are molecules that occur only in the laboratory.

It could seem almost like these bacteria are clairvoyant, you know? Like they anticipated that at some point they would need to be resistant against antibiotics when humanity came along, right? But there’s a very mundane explanation that has to do with these latent kinds of traits that we identified in experiments in the lab. So these traits really exist out in nature. They’re not just artifacts of experiments.

- Interview with Andreas Wagner author of the new book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

Do Spiders, Cuttlefish, Beared Dragons Dream?

Rößler isn’t the only researcher thinking about such questions in animals distantly removed from ourselves. Today, researchers are finding signs of REM sleep in a broader array of animals than ever before: in spiders, lizards, cuttlefish, zebrafish. The growing tally has some researchers wondering whether dreaming, a state once thought to be limited to human beings, is far more widespread than once thought.

REM sleep is generally characterized by a suite of features in addition to rapid eye movements: the temporary paralysis of skeletal muscles, periodic body twitches, and increases in brain activity, breathing and heart rate. Observed in sleeping infants in 1953, REM was soon identified in other mammals such as cats, mice, horses, sheep, opossums and armadillos.

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Researchers have since observed a similar state in octopuses. If octopuses and cuttlefish dream, “it just kind of blows down the walls of what we think about humanity being so special,” Iglesias says.

Researchers have also observed a REM-like stage in bearded dragons by recording signals from electrodes in their brains. And they have reported at least two sleep states in zebrafish based on the fishes’ brain signatures. In one of the states, neural activity synced up like it does in a non-REM stage of mammals. In another state, the fish showed neural activity reminiscent of a waking state, as happens in REM. (The fish didn’t show rapid eye movements.)

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With all these signs, it’s fair to posit that animals could be dreaming, Ungurean says. “However, if we take these reasons one by one, it turns out that none of them is sufficient.” The brain activity associated with replay, like that of the maze-running mice, doesn’t occur only during REM or sleeping, Ungurean says. It can also occur during planning or daydreaming. And the link between REM and dreaming isn’t absolute: Humans dream in non-REM too, and when drugs are used to suppress REM sleep, human study participants can still have lengthy and bizarre dreams.

Ultimately, people know they are dreaming because they can report it, Ungurean says. “But animals cannot report, and this is the biggest problem that we have in purely scientifically and robustly establishing this.”

- More Here

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides

Abstract

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking – the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of a representative sample of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, raceand gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Furthermore, zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

Introduction

In this paper, we explore whether a hypothesis first proposed by anthropologist George Foster (1965, 1967) can help shed light on the contemporary social, political, and cultural dynamics of the United States. Foster hypothesized that many societies harbor a “zero-sum” perception of the world, or as he described it, an “image of limited good.” This worldview implies that the gains of some are invariably the losses of others, based on the underlying assumption that societal output is limited and that efforts and exchanges, rather than creating value, merely reallocate it.

Although Foster developed this hypothesis to study economic beliefs and social relations in rural Mexico, he offered many examples from other parts of the world, and recent research raises the possibility that his insights might be very general (Carvalho et al., 2022). Zero-sum thinking appears to have been prevalent throughout history, ranging from European Mercantilism in the Early Modern period to modern-day trade and immigration policies (Thurow, 1980, Rubin, 2003).

Conclusion 

The first part of the paper documents a strong and robust relationship between zero-sum thinking and views about politics and policy. Individuals who view the world in more zero-sum terms tend to believe there is an important role for policies that redistribute income from the rich to the poor and that help disadvantaged groups (e.g., affirmative action for women and Black Americans). They also support more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking is not mainly a partisan issue but can help explain otherwise puzzling within-party variation in policy views.

We also examined the historical and ancestral roots of zero-sum thinking. We find that three key factors in the history of the United States are important determinants of zero-sum thinking: economic intergenerational mobility, immigration, and enslavement. These three factors shape zero-sum thinking through the direct experience of an individual and their ancestors (e.g., whether they were immigrants or enslaved), and more indirectly (e.g., whether they lived in counties with a high share of immigrants or enslaved peopel).

Our findings highlight the role played by differences in perceptions about the basic nature of human interactions. They suggest that one’s view on a wide range of social, political, and economic issues may be strongly influenced by the extent to which one perceives the gains in society as coming at the expense of others – i.e., zero-sum thinking. These results raise a host of questions that could guide future research.

Notably, given the fundamental nature of zero-sum thinking, could it also explain other economic, political, or social phenomena associated with it? Populism, conspiracy theories, or nativism all have at their roots in the belief that one group gains at the expense of others – whether it be a global elite, the “deep state,” or those from other countries. Given the current crises facing the world, there is also the natural question of how zero-sum thinking relates to views about climate change and global inequality.

Our analysis has shown that differences in zero-sum thinking are connected to historical forces in systematic ways. Individuals are more zero-sum today if they have ancestors who lived in an environment, or if they directly experienced, events that were more zero-sum. Understanding whether shorter-run experiences also affect zero-sum thinking is an interesting question for future research.

- Full paper here

Max came and changed my life. I stopped dwelling on my past Indian heritage, my childhood, my parents et al plus stopped dreaming about future utopia. I  knew that the so-called future utopia  was a life without Max. 

He nudged me daily to live in the present and taught me to adapt myself to "now" without any preconceived notions and baggage from the past. 

I am eternally grateful for that gift. 

I miss Max everyday but I didn’t die nor die everyday slowly without him. 

Instead, I try to be better and more open minded than the person who lived 13 plus years with Max. 

I have a responsibility as an animal in its prime to do even little to make this world little better than the one I inherited. 

This paper is so beautiful (yes, if you dig deeper you will find faults but that's not the point). 

It captures the core problem - we all carry baggage from our parents and even worse, our ancestors who we even never met! 

We need to shed it. Shed the baggage from past. Shed Nostalgia. 

This has nothing to do with not being "loyal" to them but it means growing up as a better human being. 

Otherwise, life will be horrible not only for you but it has immense societal consequences (that's the point of this paper). 

What to shed? Rudimentary rule - if something takes up your present time, adds no value to become a better human being, worse brings pain and suffering to oneself and/or living beings; then shed it. 

Learn the from the past and we need to grow up.

So once again my favorite quote of all time: 

Mind as a River

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this "friction": the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be....

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.

- The 33 Strategies of  War by Robert Greene.

Self domestication and the evolution of language

Abstract

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. 

We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of changes in our genome, then we might ask something like, “What are the genetic bases of language structure and why were they selected?”

 However, if cultural evolution can account for language structure, then this question no longer applies. Instead, we face the task of accounting for the origin of the traits that enabled that process of structure-creating cultural evolution to get started in the first place. 

In light of work on cultural evolution, then, the new question for biological evolution becomes, “How did those precursor traits evolve?” We identify two key precursor traits: 

(1) the transmission of the communication system through learning; and 

(2) the ability to infer the communicative intent associated with a signal or action. 

We then describe two comparative case studies—the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog—in which parallel traits can be seen emerging following domestication. Finally, we turn to the role of domestication in human evolution. We argue that the cultural evolution of language structure has its origin in an earlier process of self-domestication.

- Full paper here

Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative - PPMI

Michael J Fox foundation has launched this study. People over 18 years old (in the US) with or without Parkinson's can join this study. 

Most important thing one can share to make strides in Cancer, Parkinson's et al., is to share their data. This is still a smaller scale when compared to Neo's Dog Aging Project. 

Sharing your data will help trillion times than say a billion dollar "donation" or "walk" of a cause.  There has been billions of dollar already spent on cancer for 50 plus years and no big strides. Walking and running is not just signaling but it sometimes kills patients because of traffic congestion. 

You can sign up HERE 

You can help save lives, reduce pain and suffering of your loved ones or someday yours too. 

And personally, this will help reduce and slowly eliminate the useless cruelty of Animal Testing. 

Moving Away From Animal Experiments - The Student Perspective

This is a surprising perspective that I never thought of. 

There are also emotional impacts on students and researchers performing the experiments. These impacts range from teaching the students to see animals as commodities and creating a physical/psychological burden by going against their ideals by teaching students to disregard their own moral intuitions. In other words, advocating for laboratory animals can serve to protect their rights, but it can also protect students and support animal-free innovations. In practice, however, this has been proven difficult. 

 

The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?

I knew this day would come 15 plus years ago when a popular newspaper will publish 2 decades old science as "latest".

Even a guy like me knew about the FOXP2 gene when Max was a puppy!

And god knows how long it will take for common people to comprehend that language means crap and all animals have it one way or another. Let's be humble and be kind to all animals. 

Most important point here is another bullshit from Rene Descartes which was pampered for 4 plus centuries and was the central reason for humans unleashing brutality on animals. 

So NYT piece: 

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.

Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

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This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.

Science Funding - It's A Miracle How We Got So Much Knowledge!

I knew there was an issue but Stuart Buck's insightful post is scary to say the least! 

I would like to add this is not just a government problem but it is an issue with private funding too. 

Science funding agencies feel political pressure to fund only research that is easy to explain and defend to lay members of the public and to Members of Congress, the vast majority of whom are not trained as scientists. And the kind of research that tends to be easier to politically defend involves incremental projects that follow a well-worn path and whose payoffs are certain and immediate.

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Unconventional, provocative, or even seemingly-irrelevant ideas often spark the biggest scientific breakthroughs, precisely for the same reasons that they are overlooked by cautious grantmakers: they're breaking new ground, often in serendipitous and unpredictable ways or in ways that are actively opposed by the existing scientific establishment at the time.

Congress and the public should embrace this fact about the source of scientific breakthrouths, and should give science funders more political leeway to take more risks and fund outside-the-box ideas to truly capitalize on American ingenuity.

That said, we have to deal with a central problem: even with the benefit of hindsight, there are probably too many cases where science funders passed over scientific work that should have been funded.

Consider the following examples:  

• Douglas Prasher’s work on cloning the gene for fluorescent protein was an essential contribution to Nobel-prize winning work. But as he told NPR in 2008, he couldn’t get NIH funding, and after a series of other jobs, he ended up driving a courtesy car for a car dealership in Alabama.
• Katalin Kariko’s early work on mRNA was a key contributor to multiple Covid vaccines. But she got demoted at the University of Pennsylvania because she couldn’t get NIH funding.
• Robert Langer at MIT got rejected on his first nine grant proposals, and even when he secured a position at MIT, he was rejected by the NIH many more times for grants related to biodegradable polymers.
• A recent story in Science: “In 2017, three leading vaccine researchers submitted a grant application with an ambitious goal,” but NIAID reviewers turned it down, because “the significance for developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine may not be high.”
• The same month that Ardem Patapoutian won the Nobel Prize in physiology, he tweeted, “I received another disappointing un-fundable score for my @NIH grant today.”
• The team that discovered how to manufacture human insulin applied for an NIH grant for an early stage of their work. The rejection notice said that the project looked “extremely complex and time-consuming,” and “appears as an academic exercise.”

This is a sad state of affairs but it's only a reflection of public interests and quest of knowledge. 

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

- Seneca

The Simplest Way to Prevent the Next Pandemic? Leave Bats Alone.

As we asked in our recent publication in The Lancet Planetary Health, how long will governments ignore the science that is in front of them? In the paper, we argue for a global taboo whereby humanity agrees to leave bats alone. People should not fear bats, and not try to chase them away or cull them; such actions would only serve to disperse them and increase the odds of zoonotic spillover. Based on the available science, we strongly believe that humanity simply needs to let bats have the habitats they need and live undisturbed.

This would not only lower the chances of another pandemic but would allow the world’s diverse bat species (there are more than 1,400) to continue to provide a range of incredibly important benefits. The ecosystem services bats provide — from insect control (which helps protect agricultural crops from pests and may well help protect us from mosquito-borne diseases) to crop pollination (important for more than 300 fruiting species, for example) — are worth billions of dollars annually.

Prevention of the next pandemic is not the same thing as dealing with one once it has been sparked. The ideas that have been put forward by the World Health Organization and other key institutions have been almost exclusively focused on preparedness and response. These are downstream (albeit vitally important) activities — for example, improving public health systems including data collection; advancing diagnostic and surveillance capabilities; strategic stockpiling of personal protective equipment, or PPE; reinforcing advances in vaccinology and other biomedical interventions; more robust planning for vaccine and PPE equity, and so on.

We strongly believe that humanity must take the simplest, most cost-effective, most common-sense upstream steps to lower the risk of another pandemic. Fixing humanity’s broken relationship with nature — and bats in particular — would diminish the interface where dangerous viruses can move from their normal hosts into people and other animals.

- More Here

In 200 Years Of Animal Welfare Concerns, Cruelty Remains A Significant Issue

No surprise for me.. sapiens hardly change leave alone moral progress. 

It breaks my heart to see how many different version of Max in other animals suffer in hands of sapiens. 

The research, published in a book, Animals in World History, due out next year, shows that instead of steady progress to eliminate animal cruelty, the priorities of animal welfare organisations have instead evolved to tackle new and emerging problems that reflect the changing attitudes of humans towards animals.

Dr Cowie highlights for example that in the 1820s the emphasis was on the elimination of blood sports such as bull and bear baiting and in the late 19th century, concern extended to the mistreatment of performing animals and the exploitation of wild animals for fashion.

With the arrival of factory farming in the mid-twentieth century, the priorities changed once again, giving rise to campaigns against substandard living conditions, live transport and inhumane slaughter methods. 

Relationship with animals

Professor Cowie said: “Examining our relationship with animals throughout history can identify the lessons that we can learn from to improve the lives and welfare of animals today.  What we find, looking back, is that although our relationships with animals have changed, cruelty and welfare issues are still as much of a concern today as they were 200 years ago.

“What we tend to find is that cruelty to animals today is less ‘obvious’ than it was in the past and better hidden from public view, particularly in the food industry. 

“Studying the history of human-animal relationships also reveals that many practices that we think of as ‘traditional’ or longstanding, are actually comparatively recent in origin, and can be traced to a specific place or time. 

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Change is possible

Professor Cowie suggests that there are lessons we can learn from the successes in the past, and that change is possible: “I think one major takeaway is that progress in the field of animal welfare has often been slow and contentious, but that change can happen with patience and perseverance. The first animal welfare law in Britain took over two decades to enact, but it happened eventually when public attitudes changed. 

“The Pacific fur seal suffered a severe population decline in the late-nineteenth century when it was hunted by US and Canadian sealers for its fur, but following the signing of the Pacific Fur Seal Convention in 1911, however, outlawing the killing of seals at sea, seal numbers quickly rebounded. 

“So while things often seem bleak for animals, we shouldn’t despair – attitudes can change and animal populations can recover, but it takes time and determination”. 

- More Here

Why Do We Get Sick? - The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine

Evolutionary medicine identifies six reasons why our bodies are vulnerable to disease. They are: 

1) defences,

2) environmental mismatch, 

3) trade-offs, 

4) conflict between survival and reproduction, 

5) co-evolution with infectious parasites 

6) constraints on natural selection. 

This explanatory framework yields insights about everything from cancer to why we age and die.

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Constraints on natural selection

Natural selection is powerful, but it’s not omnipotent. There are limits. For example, natural selection can only work with the raw material it has; if there is no genetic variation for a given trait, there’s simply nothing that can be done. Natural selection is also constrained by history, or what’s sometimes called “path dependence.” Because of the precursor from which our visual system evolved, we are stuck with the suboptimal design of having a blind spot in both eyes. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, so it can only proceed in a gradual step-by-step fashion, and each step must be a definite improvement over the last. There’s no such thing as going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch the way an engineer might. Because of this historical inertia, we’re stuck with the inelegant setup of the trachea and the oesophagus, which poses a serious choking hazard. Evolutionarily, where we can go next is limited by where we’ve already been and the existing body plan that we’re saddled with. These and other constraints limit the power of natural selection.

Since its inception, medicine has focused almost exclusively on the “how” questions of disease, largely setting aside the “why.” By tackling the missing why question—why our bodies are vulnerable to disease in the first place—evolutionary medicine supplies an exciting new layer of understanding.

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Evolutionarily informed cancer research is still in its infancy, but even so, it has already led to many new findings, and it promises more insights and practical applications over the next few years. As researchers Athena Aktipis and Randy Nesse note,

An evolutionary approach can help us understand why cancer exists and how it progresses (somatic evolution), how cancer cells interact with environments (ecological approaches), why it is not more common (natural selection for cancer suppression mechanisms), and why cancer suppression mechanisms can never be perfect (constraints, trade-offs, and other evolutionary reasons for vulnerability to disease). Evolution is essential for understanding cancer.

And It’s Not Just Cancer

Evolutionary medicine extends far beyond cancer and illuminates a wide range of health conditions. The science of why we get sick offers new insights into cardiovascular problems, tooth disease, blood iron deficiency, breastfeeding, pregnancy and miscarriage, pain, Alzheimer’s disease, aging and senescence, sepsis and even psychological disorders. We are only in the beginning stages of a revolution that is already transforming how we think about medicine, health and disease.

- More Here

Words Of Wisdom On Cancer

Remember, this is from a cancer research scientist! 

If it took so many years for a well trained person like her to get an "insight" that cancer is part of a complex system then there is no hope for common folks to understand ever. 

What you eat, where you live, how many chemicals you use in everyday life, outsourcing the food you eat, little choices you make every second - all matters plus zillion other things.The good news is you can control all this while you cannot control your race, your parents and such. 

But yet people prefer to believe "they" have "cure" for cancer, "war" on cancer and other stupid theories. 

I paid in the most painful way with Max's life with the choices I made and the beliefs of other people. 

So next time someone close to you is diagnosed with cancer - don't walk or run for cancer,  don't dwell in support groups to find closure (whatever that means) instead unpack their lifestyle - I mean everything, donate your data and  urge someone close to do so too. 

Let's get to the insights: 

One problem is the high level of variation, or heterogeneity, in tumours: variation between people, between tumours within the same person and even between regions within the same tumour.

By variation, I mean this: if you separated out the cancer cells within a tumour, they would not all be identical. You would find subpopulations of cells with diverse molecular characteristics. Some subpopulations will be larger than others, but this can change in time as the cancer progresses, and as it is challenged by different types of treatments.

This variation is not just the result of differences in the genetics of cells within a tumour. There are also differences in epigenetics (reversible changes to DNA that can impact how the genetic information is read), differences in the environment surrounding the tumour (e.g., oxygen levels, acidity levels), and differences in the interactions between the cancerous cells and other types of cells: cells that provide structure, cells that make up blood vessels, immune cells and even microbes.

Add to that the genetic and environmental differences between people, and differences in the ways cancer developed in each individual.

What you end up with is a highly complex picture in which tumours can exploit a potentially infinite pool of resources in order to continue to grow, spread and evade destruction.

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We can view a tumour as a complex system, in which many components interact with and influence each other, with the purpose of keeping the tumour alive and thriving. Any changes within this system can impact, either positively, or negatively, the tumour’s ability to persist and thrive.

Therapeutic interventions aim to destabilise this complex system, in order to shrink and destroy the tumour. But as we saw earlier, these interventions are relatively homogenous, focusing on a small number of molecular alterations, whereas the tumour can leverage a much more diverse repertoire of changes.

What an Owl Knows

A few weeks ago, Neo and I were walking around Max’s Walden on a usual quiet morning. 

Something defying gravity, came down out of nowhere across my head to the other side of the road. We both were startled! Neo growled! 

A beautiful white owl defying gravity came down like a broken branch to catch a chipmunk across the road.  

Everything happened in a split second. I had never seen anything like that in my life and it just left me more humbled by the nature we live in. I felt sorry for the chipmunk and hope he didn't feel any pain. 

Little did I know that there is new book on Owls. 

Review of the new book What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Like the rest of the natural world, owls are threatened by human action, above all by deforestation and agriculture. Island dwellers are most at risk, like the tiny Siau scops owl, which is on the verge of extinction in the shrinking forests of the Indonesian island of Siau. Even movies can pose a threat: the global popularity of Harry Potter’s pet snowy owl, Hedwig, resulted in thousands of owls being bought then dumped when their owners realised the cost and complexity of looking after them. But there are good outcomes, too. Eight hundred miles off the east coast of Australia, conservationists have brought back from the brink of extinction the Norfolk Island morepork, a beautiful chocolate-brown owl the size of your hand.

At night, where I live in Herefordshire, we often hear a barn owl hooting in a stand of pine trees behind the house. It’s an eerie, mysterious sound that never fails to enchant. And it is this enchantment that is at the core of this charming, deeply researched book. “That owl seemed like a messenger from another time and place, like starlight”, Ackerman writes of an encounter with a female long-eared owl in Montana. “Being near her somehow made me feel smaller in my body and bigger in my soul.”