Evolutionary perspectives on molecular medicine: Cancer from an evolutionary perspective

There is an active research program currently underway that treats cancer progression as an evolutionary process. This chapter investigates the ways that cancer progression is like and unlike evolution in other contexts. The aim is to take a multilevel perspective on cancer, investigating the levels at which selection may be acting, the unit or target of selection, the relative roles of selection and drift, and the idea that cancer progression may be a by-product of selection at other levels of organization. The chapter integrates data and theory from molecular biology and in situ studies of cancer progression, as well as dynamical models of cancer that represent progression as a multistage process.