[HN Gopher] Peto's Paradox
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Peto's Paradox
Author : Vigier
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-11-05 18:11 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| cube2222 wrote:
| > Peto's paradox is an observation that at the species level, the
| incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number
| of cells in an organism.[1] For example, the incidence of cancer
| in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in
| whales,[2] despite whales having more cells than humans. If the
| probability of carcinogenesis were constant across cells, one
| would expect whales to have a higher incidence of cancer than
| humans. Peto's paradox is named after English statistician and
| epidemiologist Richard Peto, who first observed the connection.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Seems conceivable that the evolutionary pressure would push
| cancer rates down to some sort a similar level across species,
| a sort of cost-benefit equilibrium.
| briga wrote:
| How long would whale lifespans be if whales had the same level of
| medical care as humans? Humans today regular live well beyond our
| natural lifespans, if we were all dying at 30 cancer probably
| wouldn't be much of an issue
| jollyllama wrote:
| >Humans today regular live well beyond our natural lifespans
|
| Is this really so? My understanding is that humans in antiquity
| who survived childhood typically lived to what we would now
| consider retirement age.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Yup. Unfortunately "mean age of death" is most commonly
| known, but in reality many children died at birth, hence
| lower mean.
| sonofhans wrote:
| You're correct; GP is wrong. Human normal lifespan is and has
| been about 70 years, once you account for early demise,
| especially from infant mortality --
| https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/
| karencarits wrote:
| Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our
| strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble
| and sorrow for they quickly pass, and we fly away
|
| Psalm 90:10 (probably from about 1000 BC)
| dinom wrote:
| At this point it's pretty safe to say that behavior has a big
| influence. I've never seen a whale smoke a cigarette, drink
| alcohol, or inhale exhaust fumes while sitting in traffic.
| MawKKe wrote:
| Maybe you hang out with the most boring of whales
| Lucent wrote:
| I thought regenerative ability vs cancer incidence was a problem
| for evolution to optimize per species rather than some
| statistical certainty per cell.
| jojobas wrote:
| I always assumed that's because with people reproductive age
| precedes cancer age by a long shot, so cancer is not an
| evolutionary consideration. Blue whales mate till they die, but
| orcas don't, So I'd expect orcas to have a higher cancer
| incidence.
| XCSme wrote:
| I thought cancer is not about the number of cells, but the number
| of cells that constantly die and have to be recreated (each time
| a cell is created, it has a chance to be a cancerous one). Maybe
| whales don't lose as many cells as humans, probably they sit less
| in the sun...
| majormajor wrote:
| I read this recently -
| https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-food-powers-y...
|
| Seems potentially related - it discussed this idea in part of it:
|
| > Maybe it's both, but Lane suspects we pay too little attention
| to the latter possibility. He argues that it might explain the
| outsized correlation between cancer and aging. From age twenty-
| four to fifty, your risk of cancer increases ninety-fold, and it
| continues to grow exponentially from there. A popular hypothesis
| holds that the root cause of this mounting risk is the
| accumulation of genetic mutations. But some scientists have
| argued that the rate of accumulation isn't nearly fast enough to
| explain the extraordinary trajectory that cancer risk takes over
| a lifetime. Nor does the gene's-eye view explain why some tumors
| stop growing when moved into a different environment. For Lane,
| these facts suggest that cancer is best thought of as a
| derangement of metabolism.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I know about it from this blog post (warning: it's about
| politics, not biology)
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
| odabaxok wrote:
| Kurzgesagt had a video about the topic:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ
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