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I just skimmed this article, but it doesn't appear to make the interesting point that came to my mind when reading it, which is: in a multicellular organism, wh

by gwillen 15y ago

I just skimmed this article, but it doesn't appear to make the interesting point that came to my mind when reading it, which is: in a multicellular organism, what the article calls a "cheater", we call a "cancer". A "cheater" is just a cell which, despite its common origin, has mutated to compete with the other cells instead of cooperate with them. And indeed, we see cells do that; we also see adaptations -- the tumor suppressor genes -- specifically designed to inhibit such cells.

jcitme 15y ago
I came away with the opposite conclusion: "If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit. The only exceptions are brand new cheater mutants in all-cooperator groups, and these could pose a problem if the mutation rate is high enough and there are many cells in the group to mutate. In fact, the scientists calculated just how many times amoebae that arose from a single cell can safely divide before cooperation degenerates into a free-for-all. The answer turns out to be 100 generations or more. So population bottlenecks that kill off diversity and restart the population from a single cell are powerful stabilizers of cellular cooperation, the scientists conclude. In other words our liver, blood and bone cells help our eggs and sperm pass on their genes because we passed through a single-cell bottleneck at the moment of conception." If anything, I felt this section was /strongly/ hinting at cancer in a group of cells. Rereading it, though, it seems that there is nothing explicit in here, so I'm not sure what caused me to spawn this thought process. Anyways, this article felt like solid scientific reporting, without too many 'guesses' into this application of this into cancer, like pop science nowadays.

by gwillen 15y ago

jcitme 15y ago

I came away with the opposite conclusion: "If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit. The only exceptions are brand new cheater mutants in all-cooperator groups, and these could pose a problem if the mutation rate is high enough and there are many cells in the group to mutate. In fact, the scientists calculated just how many times amoebae that arose from a single cell can safely divide before cooperation degenerates into a free-for-all. The answer turns out to be 100 generations or more. So population bottlenecks that kill off diversity and restart the population from a single cell are powerful stabilizers of cellular cooperation, the scientists conclude. In other words our liver, blood and bone cells help our eggs and sperm pass on their genes because we passed through a single-cell bottleneck at the moment of conception." If anything, I felt this section was /strongly/ hinting at cancer in a group of cells. Rereading it, though, it seems that there is nothing explicit in here, so I'm not sure what caused me to spawn this thought process. Anyways, this article felt like solid scientific reporting, without too many 'guesses' into this application of this into cancer, like pop science nowadays.