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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

There is this:Why don't all whales have cancer? A novel hypothesis resolving Peto's paradoxhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih...

But it's an explanatory model, not an observation.

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MRP's avatar

In your analogy of cancer that isn't what happens across species. Peto's paradox is an observation that at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism. Elephants do not get cancer at the rate of elephant sized humans. Possibly because elephants have 20 copies of tumor suppressor gene TP53 in their genome, where humans and other mammals have only one. I don't think whales get cancer at all. How are we to know that the universe is filled with human like galaxies and not whale or elephant like galaxies. Wasn't there an article that suggested that phosphorus was not evenly spread out across the universe and don't we observe an over abundance of phosphorus on earth than the current model of galactic nucleosynthesis would suggest. One percent of stars cataloged have P. What if an over abundance of P is the difference between 1 tumor suppressor gene and twenty.

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