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In cooperative societies – like elephants or whales – natural selection seems to favour genetic mechanisms that suppress cancer, study says

Much research on cancer prevalence has focused on genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. But a new study by Argentine researchers offers a novel evolutionary perspective: the social structure of mammals may play a critical role in cancer risk.

The new angle has been proposed by researchers from the cancer philosophy and biology systems group at the University of Buenos Aires, led by Professor Matías Blaustein.

Their study, published on November 12 in the journal Science Advances, suggests that species characterised by strong social cooperation exhibit significantly lower cancer rates, while those shaped by intraspecific competition face higher risks.

There are disparities in cancer rates across human populations. According to the World Health Organization, the United States, with a population of 340 million, had one of the highest age-standardised cancer incidence rates in the world in 2022, at 376 cases per 100,000 people.

China, with a population of 1.4 billion, reported an incidence of 201.6 per 100,000, with both facing environmental challenges.

The interdisciplinary team led by Blaustein drew on extensive data sets – including records from more than 110,000 zoo animals across 190 species, tumour prevalence studies and comparisons of archetypal species such as cancer-resistant whales and more susceptible jaguars.

They integrated insights from mathematics, ecology, physics and molecular biology for the study titled “Coevolution of cooperative lifestyles and reduced cancer prevalence in mammals”.

They found that in cooperative societies – such as elephant herds or whale pods – older individuals played a vital role in guiding the group, such as leading migrations or teaching survival skills.

Because their survival benefited the whole community, natural selection appeared to favour genetic mechanisms that suppress cancer.

In contrast, in species marked by high intraspecific competition, the researchers observed a paradoxical phenomenon known as the “Hydra effect” – a concept borrowed from ecology where removing individuals, like cutting off a Hydra’s head, inadvertently increased population growth.

In this context, higher cancer mortality among older individuals could free up resources for younger ones, potentially allowing traits that predispose the species to cancer to persist across generations, according to the paper.

Notably, the study challenges long-standing assumptions – such as Peto’s paradox – that link larger body size or higher metabolism to greater cancer risk.

Elephants and whales, despite their massive size and long lifespans, have evolved powerful cancer defences: elephants carry 19 extra copies of the tumour-suppressor gene TP53, while certain whales have enhanced DNA repair mechanisms.

These traits, the researchers argue, are not random but have coevolved alongside cooperative social systems in which elder survival rates enhance group fitness.

Blaustein, a biologist, cancer researcher and philosopher, said he had harboured many questions about cancer for around a decade.

“Pathological conditions classified as cancer not only kill one of six people in the world, they are also widely distributed across the tree of life,” he said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post.

“We identified that species with a competitive lifestyle have higher cancer and cancer mortality rates than the cooperative species.

“We hypothesised that this could have a fitness-positive role as a programmed-obsolescence mechanism ... where the cancer activates at a certain age to allow population recycling and enable younger individuals to survive.”

Catalina Sierra, a biologist and principal author of the research article, said: “We used three large public data sets.

“The first one included information on more than 110,000 zoo animals, covering around 190 mammal species, from elephants and whales, which very rarely develop cancer, to cats or rodents, where cancer is much more common.

“The second data set measured how common tumours [neoplasia] are across a smaller group of species. The third data set focused on ‘archetypal’ species, those with extreme cancer rates,” she told the Post.

“For example, species like whales or elephants with very low incidence, versus species such as jaguars or Tasmanian devils, where cancer appears more often.”

Blaustein said some animals lived and moved in groups, such as buffalo.

“The more experienced individuals – the elders – are the ones who show the way to drinkable water or to places where food is more abundant. This benefits the whole herd. The cooperation, as life in a group, could favour the survival of these animals,” he said.

There were also differences depending on whether they lived or bred in groups or solitarily, he said.

“If a mother has only one offspring, it receives all the care, the love and dedication. On the contrary, bigger families have competition between offspring for feeding, with the consequence that the weaker frequently die,” he said.

The researchers analysed issues such as the timing of breeding stages, body size, maternal or paternal care during the breeding stages, differences between polytocous and monotocous species – having multiple offspring compared with single offspring – diet and lifestyle in relation to cancer prevalence and mortality rate.

“We carried out statistical analyses to look for links between cancer and different lifestyle or life-history traits,” Sierra said.

“Then, together with physicists and mathematicians, we built a population model that divides individuals into young, reproductive adults and older non-reproductive adults; the model considers resource availability and how cooperative or competitive individuals are.

“This allowed us to simulate different scenarios and see in which conditions mortality among older adults [which in the model represents cancer incidence] increases.”

Sierra said the results were conclusive.

“What was remarkable was that the trends that appeared in the simulations matched what we observed in the real data: in more cooperative populations, cancer tends to be less frequent, while in more competitive ones it can even have a “beneficial” effect at the population level, because it favours the renewal of individuals,” she said.

“It is a counterintuitive result, but it is very revealing of how the way species are socially organised can influence their vulnerability to cancer.”

Blaustein argued that, “In ancient Greek mythology, if you cut the Hydra head, hoping to kill it, it had a paradoxical effect, producing more heads …

“In the cancer field we demonstrated with mathematical models that the competitive species benefit from higher cancer rates; on the contrary, the cooperative species find an advantage in lower cancer rates.”

Even though the Argentine team did not research differences between human groups and only compared humans as one species with other mammalian species, Blaustein speculated that the study could be used to analyse and debate the social organisation and life of human beings.

“Human beings present another level of complexity due to the interrelation between biological and socio-cultural issues,” he said.

“We did not work directly with humans but in speculative terms, humanity has evolved based on its socialisation and cooperation capacity to live in groups, feed and look for resources.”

“The current global productive system is associated with greater competition, individualism and increasing inequalities; so it should not be surprising to find a 22 per cent increase in cancer cases in the last 30 years.

“People have to work between 10 and 14 hours in some cases, without having time to sleep even eight hours a day, nor being able to enjoy leisure or sports. This generates immunosuppression. All this is a key factor in cancer progression in our bodies.”

Blaustein offered his opinion that inequalities were a crucial factor in the prevalence of cancer and illness in humans.

“Despite the biomedical developments, we are not seeing lower cancer rates. A considerable part of lower-income countries has an increase in cancer mortality rates,” he said.

He said cancer rates were not likely to decline in cases such as in Argentina where carcinogenic pesticides were sprayed near rural schools close to crop fields.

“It is not difficult to imagine another society with stronger bonds between humans and non-human living beings. We should think of a different society based on mutual aid, collaboration and cooperation as a way to avoid cancer.

“We should think of healthcare as a right and not a business, being able to have early diagnosis and treatments.”

However, he said the mammal study had limits when it came to analysing human social issues.

“We worked with primates. In this group we found high and low cancer incidence rates. Also, we found competitive and cooperative species. So, analysing primates we cannot have an obvious conclusion related to humans.”

OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, whose parent company is one of the AI giant’s major investors, Thrive Capital.

Thrive Holdings operates like a private equity firm for AI, rolling up companies that it believes could benefit from the tech in sectors like accounting and IT services.

Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but it will involve OpenAI embedding engineering, research, and product teams within Thrive’s companies to accelerate AI adoption and boost efficiency, the company says. If those companies succeed, OpenAI’s stake will grow, and it will get compensated for its services, according to reporting from CNBC.

The partnership follows a pattern of circular dealmaking for the $500 billion AI giant, which also recently took stakes in infrastructure partners like Advanced Micro Devices and CoreWeave. Analysts will be watching to see if Thrive-owned firms actually succeed in building long-term profitable businesses using OpenAI’s tech, or if the result is really just pumped-up valuations based on speculative market potential.

Formula One’s world championship is going down to the wire, with McLaren duo Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen set to square off in a three-way title fight

Lusail, Qatar

Max Verstappen was in a taunting mood.

The four-time Formula One world champion had no business being in the hunt to make it five. By all rights, he should have been out of contention weeks ago. But there he was, ready to race in the desert, within striking distance of his two McLaren rivals—and Verstappen wanted to remind them why.

“We are in this fight, still,” he said over the weekend, “because of other people’s failures.”

Sure enough, during Sunday’s Grand Prix here, those people failed again in spectacular fashion. Another McLaren debacle, which turned on a strategic blunder early in the race, opened the door for Verstappen to take his fifth victory in the past nine outings. The result under the lights and the fireworks of Qatar meant that this year’s world championship is heading for a three-man showdown at the final race of the season on Dec. 7 in Abu Dhabi.

As things stand, McLaren’s British driver Lando Norris sits in first place with 408 points. Verstappen, of Red Bull, is lurking behind him with 396, while Norris’s Australian teammate, Oscar Piastri, now sits on 392. (Formula One awards 25 for a victory, 18 for second, 15 for third, and continues all the way to 10th place.)

The scenario is clear: If Verstappen can win on Sunday and Norris finishes off the podium, the Dutchman will take his fifth consecutive title and cement his place among the greatest F1 drivers of all time. He would also condemn McLaren to one of the biggest chokes in the history of the sport.

“Well,” Verstappen said after taking the checkered flag, “it’s all possible now.”

Back in August, after the Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen seemed more likely to trade in his car for a bicycle than to contend for the world championship. He was 104 points off the lead. His team leadership was emerging from turmoil. And Verstappen himself was prepared to write off the season.

Only one race at a time, he began to claw his way back. He won at Monza, then in Baku. He finished second in Singapore, then scooped up another first place in Austin, Tex. There was no doubt that his Red Bull wasn’t as quick as the otherwise dominant McLaren, but McLaren’s was facing an issue more tactical than mechanical. The car was so fast for so much of the season that the stiffest competition its drivers faced was from each other.

Many teams in that spot would simply have picked one of them to be their No. 1 and focused their resources on delivering him to the title. Instead, McLaren devised what it called the Papaya Rules: Norris and Piastri were free to race each other and the road would decide which one would win his first F1 championship.

The problem with that approach was that neither one put enough daylight behind him. Norris and Piastri chipped away at each other, while the enemy in the Red Bull kept making strides. Watching them from afar, Verstappen could only scoff at the Papaya Rules. If he’d been driving a McLaren, he said last week, “We wouldn’t be talking about a championship. It would already have been won, easily.”

The comeback truly began to materialize last month in Las Vegas when both McLarens were disqualified for a technical infringement, leaving Verstappen to close the gap by 25 points with his Sin City victory. The footsteps were growing louder. Verstappen was like the creature in the monster movie who was never quite dead—in fact, McLaren CEO Zak Brown said as much.

But if that was the case, then McLaren was the hopeless character who forgot to bolt the back door.

Nothing made that clearer than the team’s tactics in Qatar over the weekend. When an innocuous battle for ninth place led to a crash and the emergence of the safety car after Lap 7, most teams on track made the wise call to pit for a fresh set of tires. McLaren, betting on a different strategy, chose not to.

It didn’t take long for the engineers on the pit wall to realize that they had handed Verstappen a huge advantage. If he played his cards right, he would only need to make one more stop in the remaining 50 laps. The McLarens would require two.

“We made the wrong decision,” said Norris, who had already been passed by Verstappen in the first corner of the race. “That was clear as soon as it happened.”

Norris finished fourth. Piastri, who had started in pole position, came second. Both were disconsolate on Sunday night. Verstappen was flirting with the most stunning comeback since Lewis Hamilton reeled in Felipe Massa in 2008, and the McLarens clearly understood that it could have been prevented.

“I haven’t spoken to anyone but I feel pretty crap as you can imagine,” Piastri said. “I don’t know what to say.”

Trump’s tariffs have at least eight frequently contradictory aims (as I have said before). Let’s focus on the trade deficit, that being the one at which April’s “liberation day” tariffs (that got finally sort of implemented in August) were aimed. There was a fall in the goods deficit in August. Is the plan working?

Answer: not so far. And, if it does, it almost certainly won’t be in the way Trump wants. The standard macro view is that tariffs can’t be used to close current account deficits, which are driven largely by relative savings rates.

As a recent paper published by Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs points out, there are certain circumstances under which they might. But they involve raising the price level and hurting real consumption, which isn’t really the outcome Trump wants. (If you really want to go for it, you can raise tariffs until they cause a full-blown recession, whereupon the trade deficit will certainly fall on a cyclical basis.)

There have been some pretty big swings in imports and exports this year, but they look a lot more like tactical front- and back-running of tariffs by companies, not shifts in production. As the academic Richard Baldwin points out, there was a massive surge in imports straight after Trump was elected last year as companies built up stocks of imported goods, particularly capital and input goods. This caused the trade deficit to explode.

Then imports and exports fell when the tariffs were announced and implemented after March 2025, bringing the trade balance to similar deficit levels as before. The fall in exports seems to reflect US manufacturers’ inability to sell abroad owing to difficulties obtaining imported inputs, in a development as unpredictable as Christmas.

Geographically there has been a bit of a shift in bilateral deficits from Asia to elsewhere (and from China to other countries nearby, such as Vietnam). But nothing radical.

Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations removed gold and pharmaceuticals, goods that are both relatively easy to stockpile, from trade flow data, and found it made the trade balance quite steady. The deficit fell in August, but there have since been massive surges in imports of chips and electronics from Taiwan to build data centres.

Baldwin’s conclusion is that the Trump tariffs have “temporarily distorted but did not repair” the trade balance by first causing a front-running surge and then curtailing it. That seems about right so far. Companies may well now engage in “back-running”, holding off buying imports if they think tariffs will come down as Trump agrees more bilateral deals.

If the deficit doesn’t fall, Trump could acknowledge that tariffs aren’t working to fix it and whack them back up again (unlikely). Or he could turn to other instruments to try to close the trade gap (more likely). Or he could just lie and say the deficit is falling even when it isn’t (the favourite). In any case, the standard economic view that tariffs don’t close deficits is so far holding. Reality has a pronounced macroeconomic bias.

Last week in the Trade Secrets column I wrote about whether Trump’s tariff campaign was approaching its upper limits, as the inflationary threat intensifies its unpopularity. Is this a weakness trading partners currently negotiating gunboat deals can exploit? Or, at the very least, is there evidence that their publics are turning against too craven an approach?

There have certainly been a couple of examples of spine emerging, though it’s far too early to call a trend. One is Indonesia, whose government has signalled it will resist “poison pill” clauses that the US is trying to insert into its trade deal.

This is an interesting contrast with fellow Asean countries, such as Malaysia and Cambodia, which opted for the tactic of signing deals and hoping the US didn’t actually try to use its leverage. To be fair, it is easier for Indonesia, as it is much less reliant on exports to the US.

Where else? Well, Switzerland was among the hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs in August, before it negotiated a deal in November that brought them down sharply. Now there are complaints about the sordid way the pact was stitched up by a Swiss corporate oligarchy who gave Trump a Rolex clock and engraved gold bar to put on his desk. There’s no pleasing some folk, and I’m edging towards the conclusion that the Swiss are a hot-headed and erratic people.

It’s anyone’s guess whether this distaste for bling bargaining is going to kill the agreement as it wends painfully through the labyrinth of the Swiss budget process. The interesting thing will be if Switzerland ends up holding one of the country’s frequent referendums on the issue, showing us directly what happens when the public gets to vote on a gunboat deal.

As ever, the big test case on standing up to Trump is the EU. The bloc is making defiant noises about not rewriting its tech rule book in return for lower steel tariffs, while having already signalled that, to some extent, it will do just that. One thing to note is that Brussels still seems to think Trump will stick to the deals he makes. This is despite his reneging on the supposed understanding back in July that the US would support Ukraine in return for the EU accepting some tariffs.

Franco-Israeli tycoon has locked horns with creditors over debt-laden telecoms empire

Bonds issued by part of billionaire Patrick Drahi’s heavily indebted Altice telecoms empire plummeted on Monday, after he moved the bulk of the group’s assets out of creditors’ reach.

The “drop-down” transaction, announced late on Friday, shifted Altice International’s Portuguese and Dominican assets out of creditors’ pool of collateral — assets they can call on if debt is not repaid — and designated them as “unrestricted” subsidiaries. 

Those assets, Altice Portugal SA and Altice Caribbean Sarl, account for about 80 per cent of Altice International’s earnings. Until Friday, they had been pledged as security to creditors who own more than €8bn of the group’s bonds. 

“Its super aggressive . . . he’s just taken €5bn of value from creditors,” said one credit investor.

Some of Altice International’s most senior debt fell as much as 12 per cent on Monday morning, from 75 cents on the euro to 66 cents. Two of its junior bonds fell from around 35 cents on the euro to just over 16 and 19 cents respectively, their largest-ever intraday drop.

Drahi, a Franco-Israeli tycoon, has built a sprawling telecoms empire through a series of debt-fuelled acquisitions over the past two decades.

He has been in conflict with creditors in recent years as interest rates have risen and his debts have come due for renegotiation.

Friday’s transaction follows Altice USA’s decision last week to sue lenders holding the bulk of its $26bn debt, accusing them of illegally colluding in an attempt to force the company into bankruptcy.

Altice France’s management angered bondholders last year by raising the prospect of aggressively shifting assets away from them — in a similar move to Friday’s transaction by Altice International.

But Drahi eventually struck an amicable €24bn restructuring deal with creditors of his French business in February. The deal involved handing a 45 per cent stake in the company to creditors in exchange for a substantial debt writedown.

However, at the time some analysts and investors believed bondholders were at greater risk of asset stripping at Altice International than at Altice France, because French law prevented Drahi from taking the most aggressive course of action at the domestic business.

As well as moving the assets away from existing creditors, Altice Portugal had already raised €750mn of new debt through “a private financing transaction” to pay upcoming liabilities of Altice International, as well as for general working capital purposes, the company said on Friday.

Altice International also said that it could raise another €2bn of new debt at Altice Portugal to follow the transaction.

As the assets moved out of creditors’ reach on Friday are now no longer governed by Altice International’s existing credit agreements, they can also be sold or used to pay dividends without needing creditors’ permission.

Drahi — who is currently working on the potential sale of Altice’s French operation, SFR — is expected to restart a process to find a buyer for Altice Portugal in due course.