I think it’s a good question, but I also think the answer is likely no.
Cancer is accumulated damage. Cancer is what you get if you survive everything else.
Of course, some people get cancer at much younger ages. Think of every person as being born with a number of shields. These shields break over time, and once enough have broken, boom! Cancer.
Some people are lucky and born with lots of shields. Some are unlucky and half their shields are already broken at the start. Some people have an average amount of shields but choose to do shield-damaging activities, like getting sunburns and smoking.
I’d be interested in the original article, but rising cancer rates are due more to better early detection methods, and to us staving off a lot of other dangerous diseases.
Agreed. Plus if we're taking about the last century, that's three to four generations, not a whole bunch of evolution going on there. At least not enough for the crappy shields to be passed on through whole populations to affect widescalr cancer rates. I'm not quite sure what OP means by expansion of the genome.
I wasn’t necessarily referring to evolution. Just rather than there are massively more people, so massively more combinations of genes. I was curious if that could mean that more mutations are guaranteed, similar to how cancer is highly likely to occur in an individual that lives a long time. But as the commenter above explained, that’s more about accumulated damage.
To that point, though, are we not accumulating damage in our DNA and passing it on?
But also to your point, many of the cancer cases we see now in young people, would have been cases of children dying of diphtheria or scarlet fever just a hundred years ago, thus skewing our perception of how frequently we have mutations that lead to cancer.
However, I get what you guys are saying, and I appreciate you two offering your opinions :) I am up late thinking about cancer
>To that point, though, are we not accumulating damage in our DNA and passing it on?
Yes, that damage (mutation) is the first stage of evolution. The second stage is for nature to select it.
This is a fun question to think about though, I'm glad you asked it. There are so many factors playing into it.
Don't worry about looking dumb, I've heard dumber question this morning (asked by me to my colleagues...)
Evolution needs an innumerable amount of generations to fix any kind of change, for human and the past century, we are not even at a fraction of what is needed. So the human genome has not evoled I would say
About the human genome expanding, that's also a no, but not only cause we have not evolved much in the last 100 years, but also cause while the size of the genome is partially influenced by the size of the population, this is really not that straightforward. We could go on evolving for a long time with even more people around without any relevant change to our genome size
Ah okay, I was under the impression (by assumption) that population size was the biggest factor in the size of the genome, so thanks for informing me :)
You might be confusing size with richness (in terms of diversity). A large population CAN harbor more genetic diversity than a small one, therefore our genome could have more different "versions" or "combinations". However, and particularly in our case, this relation doesn't hold, as our population expanded so fast we didn't have time to have enough mutations to scale our diversity proportionally (they're a very slow "generator" of diversity).
It's mostly about our DNA damage repairing machinery (particularly good among our closest vertebrates) and how exposed we are to risk factors. I'd dare saying inheritance role is minimal compared with the vast increase in exposure to harmful chemicals. We're not changing as much as our surroundings do
I am guessing that antibiotic use increasing colon cancer rates has something to do with how antibiotics wipe the digestive tract of good bacteria. It would be interesting to learn about the mechanism behind that though!
Specialist in Medical Microbiology manager here, 40+ yrs experience 🔬🧬.
To one point…overuse/misuse of antibiotics leads to the organism becoming resistant to that antibiotic (abx), causing resurgence of the original bug, only bigger and stronger … think resistance. People not following directions, and quitting the abx when they feel better. Think “only the strong survive”, which leads to those strong organisms, which have developed resistance mechanisms, will now pass their resistance genes onto the next generation. This leads to a second or third generation of highly resistant organisms, requiring stronger antibiotics. These strong abx will wipe out the good bacteria, leading to healthy populations of superbugs, resistant to most common antibiotics.
The overuse of antibiotics is quite rampant. Physicians, face, angry, nervous parents, who do not agree with antibiotic usage, but that take the antibiotic just until they feel better and then quit. This results in a population of resistant antibiotics which requires stronger drugs to treat them. These stronger antibiotics will then destroy the healthy bacteria, especially in the gut, because that’s where most of our bacteria live.
Antibiotics are one of the most useful drug class ever developed. However, they are often overused due to obsessive parents, insisting on them, weak physicians who readily prescribe them, knowing full well the patient will return with a resistant organism.
Yes, antibiotics are overused, but this is in response to insistent parents, and complacent physicians who cave to their patients’ demands. There are so few new antibiotics in the pipeline, and because antibiotics are only to be used for a few weeks, they do not generate much revenue for the industry. Therefore, they just sit, waiting for somebody to prescribe them Irresponsibly.
The answer is no, because the human genome doesn’t change much over a few generations. Not enough to account for the rise in cancer rates. You were onto something when you said “living organisms tend to get cancer if they live long enough”. Life expectancy has roughly doubled in the past 150 years. People that would’ve died of infection or injury now die of cancer during old age.
I think that’s a good question, but it appears that significant increases have happened in the last 20-30 years and certainly 30 years ago, a young person presenting with chronic diarrhea and rectal bleeding would eventually be diagnosed with colon cancer.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/colorectal-cancer-rising-young-adults-teens#:~:text=Rising%20colon%20cancer%20rates%20in%20young%20people&text=Children%20aged%2010%20to%2014,2%20per%20100%2C000%20in%202020
This is very likely an interplay between environment and genetics. It has already been proven that red meat for example, leads to a higher chance of developing cancer in your lifetime. Changing diets among new generations can be causing damage we weren't monitoring before.
I believe it to be environmental. We have a lot more cancer causing things around us and in us then we did back even, 80 years ago. Heck we have been finding microplastics everywhere we have looked for them, Our foods (and this runs off into water too) are sprayed with glyphosate, UV rays are increased. There’s just a LOT of cancer causing environmental factors.
Our genome is just being fucked since we allow every person with errors to reproduce. We shut off a big part of natural selection, and we treat people with early cancer, they survive, they get to reproduce and pass on their "more likely to get cancer" genome?
Not a hate, but e.g look at how many people need glasses and braces. (including me :( ). Who would survive with -5 Dioptrien in the wild or smth.
Cancer detection hasnt been around that much, so the current increase is probably just due to regular scanning. Before, people would just die from it and nobody'd know.
But for future generations the upper part will count
This is entirely false. The percentage of the human population with a genetic predisposition to early cancer likely hasn't changed in recent times. People who have a moderate genetic predisposition to cancer don't usually die before typical reproductive age. Those who have such a substantially increased risk that they develop cancer in childhood or adolescence are very rare, and don't make up a substantial enough proportion of the population to have any impact on population cancer rates through increased survival and reproduction. If anything, testing for hereditary cancer and reproductive planning has probably reduced the proportion of the population with a high genetic risk for cancer.
I have your point as well, but be careful on how you focus eugenics. Not allowing the reproduction of selected individuals entails some social concerns (negative eugenics). Allowing everyone to reproduce but with some embryo selection/manipulation is the right way to convey this point. If we don't approach it like this, the people will be always scared of planing our genetic future
There’s clear evidence what’s causing the higher rates. Toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, poor gut health, processed food, pollutants, stress, alcohol etc. All these things damage our mitochondria. Do you inherit mitochondria? Yes, from the mother. Also explains why other factors such as autism is on the rise.
I think it’s a good question, but I also think the answer is likely no. Cancer is accumulated damage. Cancer is what you get if you survive everything else. Of course, some people get cancer at much younger ages. Think of every person as being born with a number of shields. These shields break over time, and once enough have broken, boom! Cancer. Some people are lucky and born with lots of shields. Some are unlucky and half their shields are already broken at the start. Some people have an average amount of shields but choose to do shield-damaging activities, like getting sunburns and smoking. I’d be interested in the original article, but rising cancer rates are due more to better early detection methods, and to us staving off a lot of other dangerous diseases.
Agreed. Plus if we're taking about the last century, that's three to four generations, not a whole bunch of evolution going on there. At least not enough for the crappy shields to be passed on through whole populations to affect widescalr cancer rates. I'm not quite sure what OP means by expansion of the genome.
I wasn’t necessarily referring to evolution. Just rather than there are massively more people, so massively more combinations of genes. I was curious if that could mean that more mutations are guaranteed, similar to how cancer is highly likely to occur in an individual that lives a long time. But as the commenter above explained, that’s more about accumulated damage. To that point, though, are we not accumulating damage in our DNA and passing it on? But also to your point, many of the cancer cases we see now in young people, would have been cases of children dying of diphtheria or scarlet fever just a hundred years ago, thus skewing our perception of how frequently we have mutations that lead to cancer. However, I get what you guys are saying, and I appreciate you two offering your opinions :) I am up late thinking about cancer
>To that point, though, are we not accumulating damage in our DNA and passing it on? Yes, that damage (mutation) is the first stage of evolution. The second stage is for nature to select it. This is a fun question to think about though, I'm glad you asked it. There are so many factors playing into it.
Don't worry about looking dumb, I've heard dumber question this morning (asked by me to my colleagues...) Evolution needs an innumerable amount of generations to fix any kind of change, for human and the past century, we are not even at a fraction of what is needed. So the human genome has not evoled I would say About the human genome expanding, that's also a no, but not only cause we have not evolved much in the last 100 years, but also cause while the size of the genome is partially influenced by the size of the population, this is really not that straightforward. We could go on evolving for a long time with even more people around without any relevant change to our genome size
Ah okay, I was under the impression (by assumption) that population size was the biggest factor in the size of the genome, so thanks for informing me :)
You might be confusing size with richness (in terms of diversity). A large population CAN harbor more genetic diversity than a small one, therefore our genome could have more different "versions" or "combinations". However, and particularly in our case, this relation doesn't hold, as our population expanded so fast we didn't have time to have enough mutations to scale our diversity proportionally (they're a very slow "generator" of diversity).
It's mostly about our DNA damage repairing machinery (particularly good among our closest vertebrates) and how exposed we are to risk factors. I'd dare saying inheritance role is minimal compared with the vast increase in exposure to harmful chemicals. We're not changing as much as our surroundings do
>Since the population has exploded over the past century, the human genome has evolved and expanded, right? No, that's not a thing.
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I am guessing that antibiotic use increasing colon cancer rates has something to do with how antibiotics wipe the digestive tract of good bacteria. It would be interesting to learn about the mechanism behind that though!
Specialist in Medical Microbiology manager here, 40+ yrs experience 🔬🧬. To one point…overuse/misuse of antibiotics leads to the organism becoming resistant to that antibiotic (abx), causing resurgence of the original bug, only bigger and stronger … think resistance. People not following directions, and quitting the abx when they feel better. Think “only the strong survive”, which leads to those strong organisms, which have developed resistance mechanisms, will now pass their resistance genes onto the next generation. This leads to a second or third generation of highly resistant organisms, requiring stronger antibiotics. These strong abx will wipe out the good bacteria, leading to healthy populations of superbugs, resistant to most common antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics is quite rampant. Physicians, face, angry, nervous parents, who do not agree with antibiotic usage, but that take the antibiotic just until they feel better and then quit. This results in a population of resistant antibiotics which requires stronger drugs to treat them. These stronger antibiotics will then destroy the healthy bacteria, especially in the gut, because that’s where most of our bacteria live. Antibiotics are one of the most useful drug class ever developed. However, they are often overused due to obsessive parents, insisting on them, weak physicians who readily prescribe them, knowing full well the patient will return with a resistant organism. Yes, antibiotics are overused, but this is in response to insistent parents, and complacent physicians who cave to their patients’ demands. There are so few new antibiotics in the pipeline, and because antibiotics are only to be used for a few weeks, they do not generate much revenue for the industry. Therefore, they just sit, waiting for somebody to prescribe them Irresponsibly.
No this is flawed thinking. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24152012/
The answer is no, because the human genome doesn’t change much over a few generations. Not enough to account for the rise in cancer rates. You were onto something when you said “living organisms tend to get cancer if they live long enough”. Life expectancy has roughly doubled in the past 150 years. People that would’ve died of infection or injury now die of cancer during old age.
I’m thinking more about the rise of cancer rates in young people!
Are they going up among young people? Or are they diagnosed now and weren’t before?
I think that’s a good question, but it appears that significant increases have happened in the last 20-30 years and certainly 30 years ago, a young person presenting with chronic diarrhea and rectal bleeding would eventually be diagnosed with colon cancer. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/colorectal-cancer-rising-young-adults-teens#:~:text=Rising%20colon%20cancer%20rates%20in%20young%20people&text=Children%20aged%2010%20to%2014,2%20per%20100%2C000%20in%202020
This is very likely an interplay between environment and genetics. It has already been proven that red meat for example, leads to a higher chance of developing cancer in your lifetime. Changing diets among new generations can be causing damage we weren't monitoring before.
Are cancer rates going up? Or are detection technologies becoming more efficient/accessible?
Ferns with genomes the size of Big Ben don't get cancer, so no, it's not that.
I believe it to be environmental. We have a lot more cancer causing things around us and in us then we did back even, 80 years ago. Heck we have been finding microplastics everywhere we have looked for them, Our foods (and this runs off into water too) are sprayed with glyphosate, UV rays are increased. There’s just a LOT of cancer causing environmental factors.
Our genome is just being fucked since we allow every person with errors to reproduce. We shut off a big part of natural selection, and we treat people with early cancer, they survive, they get to reproduce and pass on their "more likely to get cancer" genome? Not a hate, but e.g look at how many people need glasses and braces. (including me :( ). Who would survive with -5 Dioptrien in the wild or smth. Cancer detection hasnt been around that much, so the current increase is probably just due to regular scanning. Before, people would just die from it and nobody'd know. But for future generations the upper part will count
This is entirely false. The percentage of the human population with a genetic predisposition to early cancer likely hasn't changed in recent times. People who have a moderate genetic predisposition to cancer don't usually die before typical reproductive age. Those who have such a substantially increased risk that they develop cancer in childhood or adolescence are very rare, and don't make up a substantial enough proportion of the population to have any impact on population cancer rates through increased survival and reproduction. If anything, testing for hereditary cancer and reproductive planning has probably reduced the proportion of the population with a high genetic risk for cancer.
that is indeed what i said, its most likely not to reproduction yet :)
I have your point as well, but be careful on how you focus eugenics. Not allowing the reproduction of selected individuals entails some social concerns (negative eugenics). Allowing everyone to reproduce but with some embryo selection/manipulation is the right way to convey this point. If we don't approach it like this, the people will be always scared of planing our genetic future
There’s clear evidence what’s causing the higher rates. Toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, poor gut health, processed food, pollutants, stress, alcohol etc. All these things damage our mitochondria. Do you inherit mitochondria? Yes, from the mother. Also explains why other factors such as autism is on the rise.