Bertolaso Marta, Dieli Anna Maria
Departmental Faculty of Engineering and FAST Institute for Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Practice, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Roma, Italy.
Department of Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Oct 4;4(10):170470. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170470. eCollection 2017 Oct.
The major transitions approach in evolutionary biology has shown that the intercellular cooperation that characterizes multicellular organisms would never have emerged without some kind of multilevel selection. Relying on this view, the Evolutionary Somatic view of cancer considers cancer as a breakdown of intercellular cooperation and as a loss of the balance between selection processes that take place at different levels of organization (particularly single cell and individual organism). This seems an elegant unifying framework for healthy organism, carcinogenesis, tumour proliferation, metastasis and other phenomena such as ageing. However, the gene-centric version of Darwinian evolution, which is often adopted in cancer research, runs into empirical problems: proto-tumoural and tumoural features in precancerous cells that would undergo 'natural selection' have proved hard to demonstrate; cells are radically context-dependent, and some stages of cancer are poorly related to genetic change. Recent perspectives propose that breakdown of intercellular cooperation could depend on 'fields' and other higher-level phenomena, and could be even mutations independent. Indeed, the field would be the context, allowing (or preventing) genetic mutations to undergo an intra-organism process analogous to natural selection. The complexities surrounding somatic evolution call for integration between multiple incomplete frameworks for interpreting intercellular cooperation and its pathologies.
进化生物学中的重大转变方法表明，如果没有某种多层次选择，构成多细胞生物特征的细胞间合作就永远不会出现。基于这一观点，癌症的进化体细胞观点认为癌症是细胞间合作的崩溃，是发生在不同组织层次（特别是单细胞和个体生物体）的选择过程之间平衡的丧失。这似乎是一个适用于健康生物体、致癌作用、肿瘤增殖、转移以及衰老等其他现象的优雅统一框架。然而，癌症研究中经常采用的以基因为中心的达尔文进化版本遇到了实证问题：事实证明，癌前细胞中会经历“自然选择”的肿瘤前和肿瘤特征很难得到证实；细胞在根本上依赖于环境，而且癌症的某些阶段与基因变化关系不大。最近的观点认为，细胞间合作的崩溃可能取决于“场”和其他更高层次的现象，甚至可能与突变无关。事实上，“场”将是这样一种环境，它允许（或阻止）基因突变经历类似于自然选择的体内过程。围绕体细胞进化的复杂性要求整合多个不完整的框架，以解释细胞间合作及其病理情况。
