Co-Operation and Competition in Cancer

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

My mother got a manigioma brain tumor. We had it removed, and then two popped up. And so that's when i found the literature of a jonah faulkner at a harvard medical research in the sixties. I think he postulated that tumors reat an angeogenesis chemical to draw blood vessels to them but they also secrete an anti angeogenic chemical to prevent other tumors from growing. It was almost like a darwinian competition inside a body between tumors. So there you have that tension between co operation and competition. Sometimes what you can also have in these cancerous situations is that the tumours actually will work together. For example

Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin? A biologist by training, Nichola Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior — teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice — most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive and so successful.