Oddbean new post about login | logout @7edccf3d - only centuries? Only thousands of years? That's nothing! Even tigers have been around for at least 1.6 million years.
@b4c50e1b @7edccf3d Fairly old for a transmissible cancer, though. Canine transmissible venereal tumour is reckoned to be 11,000 years old. And the one that's been killing Tasmanian devils probably originated less than forty years ago.
@e89610ab @7edccf3d - if all known transmissible cancers are this young, we either haven't looked hard enough or there must be some reason they "burn out" - which would be very interesting to understand. Theoretically there could be some reason *all* transmissible cancers have arisen only recently, but I can't believe that.
@b4c50e1b @7edccf3d Several recent papers discuss such interesting evolutionary questions. The senior author of the following article is Beata Ujvari, who's also quoted in Carl Zimmer's piece: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7327844/