Peto’s paradox

Peto’s paradox is the observation that cancer incidence does not rise in proportion to body size and lifespan across species, although a whale contains roughly a thousand times more cells than a mouse and each cell is a target for oncogenic mutation.

Origin

Richard Peto noted in 1977 that, within a species, cancer risk scales with age and with the division history of tissues, but across species the scaling breaks down. Elephants, blue whales, and bowhead whales live decades longer than rodents and carry vastly more dividing cells, yet their per-cell and per-organism cancer rates are comparable to or lower than