Can New Species Evolve From Cancers? Maybe. Here’s How.
Cancer arises from the accumulation of genetic mutations in cells, which gain some reproductive advantage and multiply. Sounds very Darwinian, so why not produce a new species.While Panchin was writing about transmissible cancers, he heard his colleagues express surprise at the genes for complex tissues that were turning up in certain unusual but simple parasitic animals. Further conversations led to what Panchin calls the “fantastic” idea that such simple parasites could have cancerous origins. “So we took all the data and we proposed this hypothesis,” he said.
According to Panchin’s three-step scenario, a Scandal would start off as a cancer, but not just any cancer. It would have to be transmissible, so that it wouldn’t die when its host did. Then the cancer would have to spread to other species, and then independently evolve multicellularity. Those steps might seem to present insurmountable barriers, and yet there’s reason to believe each one could have happened.
There's a famous Blood Test for such cells.