I thought I was done with the topic of cancer, but nope! From
What history tells us XXVIII. What is really new in the current evolutionary theory of cancer?, (2012), I found some interesting history about the idea that cancer is an atavism:
The link between mutations and cancer had been proposed very early, at the beginning of the 20th century, by Theodor Boveri. He conceived the origin of cancer as the abnormal distribution of chromosomes during cell division, provoking a regression of the cell to an uncontrolled, egoistic behaviour (Boveri 1914).
The idea that cancer cells were unregulated cells that had escaped any control by the body was clearly at odds with the model that tumour cells evolve as organisms do. Once again, cancer was seen as the return to an ancestral, uncontrolled state, not the result of an open evolution.
This opposition probably explains why Wilhelm Roux did not propose an evolutionary model of cancer in his 1881 book on the fight of the parts within organisms (Roux 1881, 2012). This book was immediately well received, but rapidly forgotten. Roux proposed that a struggle between the different parts of the organism – molecules, cells, tissues and organs – took place during development. Somehow, he extended Darwinian competition to what happened within organisms during development. This competition of the different parts of the organism for resources was essential for the optimization of physiological adaptation.
Basically, Wilhelm Roux thought that in the development of a single body, the parts of a body are fighting over resources, just as bodies fight over resources in an ecosystem. The result of this (well-organized) fight is a fine and optimized body.
Since tumours also compete for food with the rest of the organism, it might have seemed appropriate to include them in the picture. Roux did not, because he considered that these cells had embryonic characteristics... and were utterly unregulated. Their behaviour could not be compared to the well-regulated competition that took place during the development of organisms (Roux 1881, 2012, p 69).
