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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> (tumor cells often use anaerobic glycolysis to make energy)

More generally, human cancers cells often seem like they've rolled-back to an earlier, atavistic set of behaviors.

I wonder if that's a "direction" of random mutations which is less-likely to be attacked by the immune system, because it leads to things that are less-alien because they were normal at one point. (Or may still be normal in limited contexts.)

Ex:

> The hallmarks of cancer are not the acquisition of novel behaviors due to genomic mutation but rather the re-deployment of ancient, unicellular programs that support survival of the cell at the expense of the host and break the contract of cooperation required for multicellular life.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00796...

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Check out the book "The Red Queen". The author points out that even chromosomes fight for survival at the expense of other chromosomes and the body. X chromosomes try to destroy the Y chromosome, for example.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.

Relatedly, the book Vagina Obscura talks about women’s anatomy as a battle between the baby (wants as many resources as possible) and the mother (doesn’t want to die from what is, essentially, a parasite.)

Fascinating mental shift to explain things like the menstrual cycle (why would we want an environment that can be fully shed every month? Isn’t that crazy expensive?)

An online essay with a similar theme:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...

"why would we want an environment that can be fully shed every month? Isn’t that crazy expensive?"

Any ideas how to raise babies more efficent?

Evolution does not optimize for the individual, but the species.

Evolution does not optimize for anything. If the organism propagates, it may propagate again. But there is no goal.

As the RQ shows, this process often leads to a dead end. Such as a short term success for cancer, but no long term success. Deadly infections lose their deadliness over time, as killing the host does not lead to propagation.

Evolution often falls into a local optima, which will inevitably lead to extinction.

Deadly diseases losing their deadliness over time is possible, but hardly guaranteed even at the species/population level. Rabies has effectively a 100% fatality rate in host species. Smallpox, which is human-specific with no animal reservoir so must have been spread consistently and entirely within humans, had a fatality rate on the order of 10-30% even after thousands of years of co-evolution.

Smallpox was much less deadly to Europeans than the Indians. Indians fell like flies to European diseases.

Covid seems to have its mortality dramatically shrunk.

Our genomes are full of bits and pieces of ancient disease DNA. Our bodies are full of bugs that have evolved into peaceful coexistence. Some bugs even became part of us (mitochondria).

> Smallpox was much less deadly to Europeans than the Indians. Indians fell like flies to European diseases.

That does not support your argument that there is a adaptive advantage for reduced deadliness. The fact that it was exceedingly deadly to non co-evolved hosts indicates it was not the disease that became less deadly, but that the co-evolved hosts developed better defenses.

> Our bodies are full of bugs that have evolved into peaceful coexistence.

That is a argument that there is a continuous adaptive advantage to reduced deadliness down to ~0%. Again, Rabies had and continues to have a nearly 100% fatality rate in co-evolved hosts for thousands of years. Smallpox had a 10-30% fatality rate. Any magical inherent adaptive advantage for reduced deadliness failed to materialize to continue pushing down their deadliness.

Or put another way, a disease can have a 30% mortality rate and still do a really bang-up job at propagation with limited adaptive pressure to reduce that further for thousands of years. Peaceful coexistence is more likely a artifact of the specific dynamic than any sort of meaningful fundamental advantage to reduced deadliness.

> it was exceedingly deadly to non co-evolved hosts indicates it was not the disease that became less deadly, but that the co-evolved hosts developed better defenses

That's a good argument, but it is not proof that there wasn't some adaptation of smallpox to Europeans. The immune systems of Europeans and Indians diverged 10,000 years ago.

> Rabies had and continues to have a nearly 100% fatality rate in co-evolved hosts for thousands of years.

I doubt that there were large enough epidemics of rabies to influence its evolution.

> Peaceful coexistence is more likely a artifact of the specific dynamic than any sort of meaningful fundamental advantage to reduced deadliness.

Killing your host does not help propagation of the disease. Causing your host to cough and sneeze is a great way to propagate.

Smallpox was incredibly deadly to Europeans, until they built up immunity through millions of people dying.

Not saying that evolution has a will, but the mechanism is that those species that are best adopted will prosper and go one. So that species that can reproduce the best, wins. So I don't see why you disagree that evolution does not optimize for it. (No one said anything about perfectly optimized)

Optimization implies intent

Not when describing a living process.

> a battle between the baby (wants as many resources as possible) and the mother (doesn’t want to die from what is, essentially, a parasite.)

That's hard to reconcile everything else we know: The baby needs a healthy mother in order to survive until and past childbirth and to be healthy itself. For the mother, for multiple reasons, nothing is more important than the baby's survival and well-being. Humans generally care for and will help and sacrifice for other humans, most especially those in their clan (however that's defined) and with their genes.

It's easy to reconcile with many pregnancies I've known amongst friends. Decrease maternal health, and real threats to her survival, are far from rare. Daily puking for an extended period is a common side effect. The mother loses a great deal of mobility in the last trimester...

Don't confuse terms like "parasite" with implying evil or malicious intent.

But that doesn't mean the mother sees herself as competing with the fetus, nor sees the fetus as a parasite. Pregnancy may be unpleasant in that sense, but only sociopaths weigh that against the fetus' well-being. When a parent buys food for their child, they don't think of their children as parasites on their income!

Oxygen-Starved Tumor Cells Have Survival Advantage That Promotes Cancer Spread[2019]

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...

I assumed this was more that the robust system survives. Oxidative phosphorylation is complicated, requiring many participating proteins in the pathway. If any of them are broken, that is it. Glycolysis is comparatively simple more likely to survive random mutation. Any cells which break glycolysis will die off.

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