Actually, cancer wasn't "discovered", as you put it, until much,
much later than that.  That, however, does not mean that cancer
hasn't always existed.  As long as DNA has existed, the means
to become cancerous has existed.

I won't bother to list all the animals species that know nothing
about fire, nor are exposed to it in any way,  but still get cancer.

The evolutionary advantage to excruciating pain with cancer is
as follows:

Remember it is difficult to talk about evolutionary advantage with
respect to humans since we have slightly derailed evolution with
the onset of human intelligence and the ability to direct our own
evolution, in a sense, and to minimize it's effects via the development
of nutrition and medicine.

But in wild animals, for example, where evolution still reigns supreme
as long as not interfered with by humans,  cancer is a negative
trait, in such cases where there is any sort of genetic
predisposition, which it is becoming increasingly clear is an
important mechanism in cancer.  Therefore, it is in the best
interests of any species to not support the maintenance of
that particular trait in their gene pool.  Excruciating pain
marks that animal as sick and weak, and probably not able
to keep up with the herd, resulting in a quick dispatch as
the first choice as prey by some predator who comes along.

This is not an advantage for the individual who has the cancer,
of course, but evolution isn't a process that works to better
the individual, but to better the species.  The species is
healthier for getting rid of any individuals who carry that
gene, so that they will not live to reproduce and send
that gene on down in the gene pool.

Clearly humans have derailed this process by aggressive
medical therapy, and one of the consequences of that,
particularly in the matter of childhood cancers, is that
there is a greater preponderance of genetically predisposed
cancer in our modern society.  I am not, in any way,
suggesting that we should return to the wild in that respect,
but only pointing out one unforeseen consequence of
better health care!  It's true of all genetically influenced
diseases which would ordinarily prevent a human
from reproducing, or reaching reproductive age.

--tension

It is not the immediate feedback of pain which makes animals
try not to be eaten.  Well, it does, because they do try very
hard to get away if they are still alive at the time.  Obviously,
however, if they fail, it is too late at that point.

But the behaviour of avoiding it before the act is the
result of the collective knowledge over years
of a species' existence (commonly called "sheer instinct", which
is itself an evolved, and genetically controlled trait) which,
if it can be successfully passed down genetically via some
sort of survival-oriented modified behaviour, constitutes the
deciding factor in whether an animal will try not to be eaten.

In other words, your baby cobra will have a better chance of
survival if he has inherited the "instinctive" behaviour trait
of threatening attack stance manifesting right at hatch.
If he is so unfortunate as to inherit a behaviour trait
that does not show this behaviour until later in life,
his odds for survival are measurably lower, and for reproduction
as well, and so eventually that particular gene will die out as
there become less and less copies of it in the cobra gene pool.
And so you have the situation today which is that most
baby cobras are born with that safer-for-survival behaviour.

The red herring is that this poster keeps insisting on the
pain of being eaten as the only pain worth considering
in this thread.  Clearly, it has been made quite obvious
that pain has many useful and essential survival functions
in many contexts in the life of an animal, but he keeps
coming back to the "being eaten" animal as the only one
that counts in the matter of pain.  He also seems to
forget that the number of animals who escape a very
painful eating attempt is much higher than the number
of animals who fail to escape...so the lesson of pain
while being attacked or partially eaten is learned by
direct experience by many more animals than not.
That, however, does not have direct bearing on the
issue of evolution of pain as a survival device.  Unless
you consider that the animals who inherit the behaviour
of struggling harder to get away, in response to the
pain, might have a better chance of survival and
reproduction in order to pass *that* particular
trait onward.

One can, in fact, theorize about evolution until one
is blue in the face but the fact remains that it is
not a nebulous philosophy, but a genetic process
which can be worked out if one thinks rationally and
logically about the science behind it.  Many people
like to just toss the term about, however, as if
evolution were a "set decorator" in nature that looks,
steps back, and decides to come up with this trait
or that trait.  It is a statistical science which has reliable
and predictable outcomes when one knows the
particular species and population concerned, the
environment they must contend with, and the
factors which will determine survival in that
particular setting.  Animal breeding for particular
traits is an excellent case in point.

--tension

That can be. There really are some extremely cruel nuts outthere:

- Some of them become political leaders and are rewarded with great power.
- Most of them become CEOs and are rewarded with wealth and respect.
- Few are killing cats and get jail time.

The same mentality, various results.

If you torture animals you are punished, if you torture people you are
rewarded, respected and enriched.

Should have been capital punishment, preferably by forced ingestion
or injection of large doses of warfarin. Second choice, slow strangulation
by hanging.

From several personal experiences, I have seen that people who are
cruel to animals move on to mistreating humans, sooner or later.
For eight years, the miscreant will not be beating his wife or
assaulting people.
For one example "Troubled" kid broke my Burmese cat's leg.  Watching
him over the years, and what he later did to people and to Society, I
sincerely regret not putting a bullet into his evil brain or throwing
him down a well.  Doing so would have saved a lot of people  much pain
and suffering.
These abusive people generally do not "Get Better", uness the general
prison population kills them.
Whether anyone likes it or not, or whether some burger-flipping
Sociology graduate disagrees, there are some people who are
intrinsically evil.
Not "Misunderstood" or "Insufficiently loved", but evil.

Heh, yes indeed. I have noticed that, when a cat appears to be
"embarrassed", it often starts to clean itself as a replacement
activity. I am sure that cats can be embarrassed. They can also
experience excruciating pain, and only an idiot would confuse the two
reactions.

"edie humperdink" <markdemers15@hotmail.com> wrote in message

Natural selection DOES NOT eliminate stuff like pain you flaming twit.
Natural selection advances traits to survive and the elimination of pain
would quickly cause a species to die out because they weren't avoiding those
things that could harm them. The existence of pain is a survival trait.
Without it, most animals would die off pretty quickly.

Animals do NOT evolve to be another species food, they evolve to survive as
a species. That has absolutely nothing to do with pain. Where on God's earth
do you think up this crap?

There's all sorts of definitive scientific evidence that animals feel pain.
Out of the thousands of chromosomes that differentiate species, many of them
are separated by only a few, like man and the great apes. For the most part,
they're built almost the same as man and feel pain just as easily. The same
can be said for many other species.

God, you're a twit. I'm finished with this discussion. Somewhere along the
line, you failed to experience pain and caused your intelligence to be
irreparably damaged.