An Open Letter to Armand Marie Leroi

Dear Armand,

I’ve recently been persuaded that I should stop identifying you as “Doctor X” and as “Reviewer Number One” of the rejected manuscript. Hence this Open Letter.

This will of necessity include material you may have read in my post-rejection email to the editor of Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) and, perhaps, in prior posts to this site. Sorry, but some duplication cannot be avoided. After all, the prime purpose of an “open” communication is to reach other people, not the nominal addressee.

Parts of this message will be disrespectful. Sorry about that, but you’ve earned it.

Evaluating The Reviewer (Part Three)

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)