Abstract
Cancer is often conceptualized in terms of selective conflict between cell and organism (Greaves 2015, Aktipis 2020). On this view, cancer involves a form of multi-level selection in which the cancerous cell phenotype is favored by selection at the cell level but opposed by selection at the organism level. Recently, Gardner (2015) and Shpak and Lu (2016) have argued that cancer is not a true case of multilevel selection, because cancer is an evolutionary dead-end. I argue that this “evolutionary dead-end” argument is powerful but not decisive.
