Posts
In my last post I summarized the difference between me and the reviewer when it came to the question “Can jellyfish get cancer?” In this posting I will explain why that question is critically important, not to cancer researchers or to jellyfish enthusiasts, but to everyone who believes evolutionary theory ought to do what it now fails to accomplish: offer a reasoned mechanistic explanation for ~550 million years of Bilaterian evolution.
In the first paragraph of my peer-reviewed 1983 Letter “Cancer and Evolution: Synthesis” I made crystal clear what this reviewer completely ignores: the nucleus of my theory, its logical core. Here, with emphasis added, are the concluding sentences in that paragraph:
“Although the precise cellular mechanisms involved in carcinogenesis are not considered here, it is assumed that within a target pre-mitotic cell the following sequence takes place: (a) the mutagen causes a mutational event and (b) oncogenes (Bishop, 1982) initiate transformation to the cancerous state following mitosis. It follows from this sequence that virtually all selected defenses against cancer would have enhanced the ability of the genomes to create organisms in which the genetic program is expressed with great fidelity in all somatic cells.” (1)
In my responding letter to the journal’s editor, which I wrote following rejection of my manuscript, I suggested he inform Doctor X (who the editor consulted prior to the review and who, in my opinion, also served as Reviewer Number One) of the following:
“Here’s my message to [Doctor X/Reviewer Number One]: Turn to the opening paragraph in the JTB 1983 Letter ... and highlight [the portion quoted in bold.] I consider any negative criticism of my idea that ignores that assertion (by refusing to agree with it, but failing to offer logical or factual refutation) to mean that the critic simply does not understand my idea or that he is not being serious.”
If my 1983 assertion is correct then it follows that selection pressure for defenses against lethal cancer in developing animals was also selection pressure for precise expression of the development program in all somatic cells.
Summarizing the logic, if carcinogens are mutagens then anti-cancer mechanisms are anti-mutation mechanisms and anti-mutation mechanisms are, by definition, pro-precision mechanisms. Perfect execution of the developmental program completely avoided the possibility of lethal juvenile cancer. In the rejected paper I argue that the fact of perfect construction of all actual ancestral Bilaterians implies the perfect execution of countless trillions of acts of developmental mitosis and that those indisputable events can only be explained by a powerful selection-based mechanism unique to Bilaterians. I claim the only known such mechanism is “cancer selection” the effect of lethal juvenile cancer initiated in a single somatic cell.
The reviewer rejects completely my contention (as published in my peer-reviewed Letters) that without the accumulation of cancer defenses Bilaterian complexity could not exist. But he doesn’t stop there. No, he actually argues for the great complexity … of jellyfish tentacles! I am delighted to reconfirm what is explicit in my Letters and in my Nature-reviewed book: the complexity of the entire jellyfish soma (including those wondrously complex tentacles) as well as all parts of every pine tree, every sponge, every mushroom and every other non-bilaterian multicell (2) came into existence without the occurrence of cancer selection. But does this poor fellow not realize he is therefore claiming that all organs found in all Bilaterians, including the human brain, came to exist as products of evolutionary mechanisms that also produced jellyfish?
I would look forward to reading his peer-reviewed papers explaining—precisely—how that could have happened but I predict no such papers will ever appear, that he will slink away, satisfied that, despite his intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness, he accomplished what—so I am convinced—he intended from the outset: he persuaded the editor to deny readers of his journal the opportunity to learn of my peer-reviewed theory’s existence and to read my proposed concise and fact-based argument for its acceptance.(3)
NOTES
(1) If I were writing that sentence today I would eliminate “virtually.”
(2) By citing in his review the petals of primroses as another example, like jellyfish tentacles, of the wondrous complexity found in multicells which (so I claim) never experienced cancer selection, the reviewer exhibits either blatant dishonesty or a level of carelessness that would mortify a schoolboy. Like Doctor X, this reviewer has read my book and in it I explain at some length (on pages 114-116) that the preciseness and complexity of flowers is adequately explained without the postulated occurrence of cancer in plants. In my opinion, this error alone renders his review worthless.
(3) Although I may, in the future, post the actual rejected manuscript, anyone who reads this post and its companion will have read the basic arguments presented (in more concise form) in the rejected manuscript.
At this site you will find links to additional material including my original Letters to the Journal of Theoretical Biology and the 1992 Nature review of my book.
