Cancer, many biologists argue, is an evolutionary disease. It is a burden of being multicellular, and a threat against which natural selection has only managed mediocre defenses. Making matters worse, cancer cells can borrow highly evolved genes for their own deadly purposes. And even within a single tumor, cancer cells get nastier through natural selection.

I’ve been following the study of evolution and cancer for some time now, and have blogged on the Loom about it here, here, and here. But it was a review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that spurred me to launch a full-blown article. The articles appears in the January issue of Scientific American, and you can read it here.

Continue reading “Cancer: An Evolutionary Disease” →

On the last day of December, I turned in the final draft of my book about E. coli and the meaning of life. This is the sixth time around for me, and I’m getting familiar now with the havoc the experience wreaks on my nerves. In the final few weeks, the book becomes a monster that follows me around to every room of the house, out on the walks I take with my family. It crouches in the movie theaters and restaurants where I go with my wife to take a break. It just sits there, rumbling and wheezing, making me aware that it is still with me. I work late into the night, trying to get it out of the house and out of my life.

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One reason I love writing about biology is that it has so many levels. Down at the molecular scale, proteins flop and twist. Higher up, cells crawl and feed and divide. They organize into animals and plants and other big organisms, which must obey their own rules in order to survive. For some organisms, a day is a lifetime. Others must weather centuries. When millions of organisms get together, they form ecosystems that wax and wane in ways that could not be predicted from lower levels. And over the course of generations, genes take on a new personality, no longer passive bits of code, but units of selection that can sweep across the planet and leap from species to species.

Continue reading “Up and Down Life’s Staircase” →

Fellow science blogger Coturnix is assembling some posts about science for an anthology. He’s been asking for people to contribute suggestions. I’ve been meaning to thumb through my old posts in order to send one over, but it’s been more of a challenge than I thought. Part of the problem is that pieces of writing are like children, and it’s no fun to break up the family. The other part of the problem is that my brain is just about reduced to goo between finishing my book and managing a couple of sick kids over the Christmas break.

Continue reading “An Appeal to the Loom’s Collective Hive Wisdom: Help Me Pick a Post” →