Whales have 1000-fold more cells than humans and mice have 1000-fold fewer; however,
cancer risk across species does not increase with the number of somatic cells and the …

Cancer is as ancient as multicellularity itself. But not all animals get cancer at the same rate.
Some, such as elephants and naked mole rats, rarely get it at all, whereas others, such as …

The past several decades have seen a paradigm shift with the integration of evolutionary
thinking into studying cancer. The evolutionary lens is most commonly employed in …

The risk of developing cancer should theoretically increase with both the number of cells
and the lifespan of an organism. However, gigantic animals do not get more cancer than …

An evolutionary perspective can help unify disparate observations and make testable
predictions. We consider an evolutionary model in relation to two mechanistic frameworks of …

Larger organisms have more potentially carcinogenic cells, tend to live longer and require
more ontogenic cell divisions. Therefore, intuitively one might expect cancer incidence to …

Peto's paradox is the lack of the expected trend in cancer incidence as a function of body
size and lifespan across species. The leading hypothesis to explain this pattern is natural …

Background Carcinogenesis affects not only humans but almost all metazoan species.
Understanding the rules driving the occurrence of cancers in the wild is currently expected to …

If the occurrence of cancer is the result of a random lottery among cells, then body mass, a
surrogate for cells number, should predict cancer incidence. Despite some support in …

The intrinsic risk of cancer increases with body size and longevity; however, big long‐lived
species do not exhibit this increase, a contradiction named Peto's paradox. Five hypotheses …