[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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