Cancer and Evolution

For the curious, here are some of the responses from ID:

I appreciate their engagement on this work. Certainly there are disagreements, but I do think this has moved the conversation forward. One value of looking at cancer is that is serves as a good theological “control.” If we see a new feature arise in evolution of species, we can always wonder if God directly inspired some mutations to make that possible. Maybe He did, but I’m not sure how to prove that one way or another, though others think they can. Cancer, however, is different. No one (as far as I know) thinks God is intervening in cancer evolution to enable cancer cells to innovate.

For this reason, among others, cancer might be among the best places to look to understand what unaided evolution can and cannot do. The good news, also, is that we are getting just a massive amount of data on cancer. This is what is going to map out the true strengths and weaknesses of evolution.