Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer
Studying cancer as an evolutionary disease. News and reviews about research on cancer and evolution from a theoretician's perspective.
Is there anything models can't do?
Date:
Monday, 06 Apr il 2009 - 00:15 UTC
I have to admit that I was thinking about posting something about coffee (it is still early in the morning here) and an article in The Economist mentions how coffee is being used to power cars. Apparently the same energy that can power people can power cars too, no idea whether that would be a sign that cars are becoming more human-like. Still, reassuringly for me, what the cars would use is not directly double espressos but the leftover grounds which would mean I could potentially feed my espresso cravings and fuel my car right with the same effort and cost.
Still, the topic of the day (or week to be a bit more realistic) is, as it was the previous time, something I read in Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is true. The book describes the use of mathematical biology by Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger in a paper entitled A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. In their model, a patch of cells capable (at least initially) of sensing light is allowed to evolve in a way in which only those mutations that increase the survival advantage were allowed to spread. Their conclusion is that, even in the worst case scenario, vision would nature evolve in only a few hundreds of thousands of years. As most evolutionary processes (unlike cancer) take lengths of time that are difficult for the human mind to fully grasp, a mathematical model can be a very useful tool to explain the evolutionary origin of one of the most sophisticated and, deceptively, engineered-like biological features.
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Last updated: Monday, 06 Apr 2009 - 00:15 UTC
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