In: Biology
The best fossil evidence suggests that life began 4 billion years ago. But free atmospheric oxygen didn't really peak until about 2.5 billion years ago. Multicellular animals did not arise until about 600 million years ago. While there is some evidence for photosynthesis and biological creation of free oxygen much earlier than that, it seems like much of the world was anoxic (without free oxygen) for over a billion years of evolutionary time. Oxygen is highly corrosive, and too much can be dangerous, even for those organisms that evolved to require oxygen (like us!). Based on what you know, what reasonable hypothesis/predictions might you make (i.e., not looking for the "truth" - looking for testable predictions!) as to why would the Atavistic Hypothesis predict that high levels of oxygen might be an effect treatment for tumors? SELECT ALL THAT APPLY.
A. High oxygen levels might not have a deleterious effect on MC genes which seem to have evolved much later than the 2.5 billion year oxygen rise.
B. We know that muscle cells can switch from aerobic to anaerobic physiological pathways, so neither of the other answers makes much sense.
C. Multicellular organisms inherited the core unicellular reproductive genes/gene network with minimal modification.
Answer of the given question is -
According to Atavistic hypothesis, as tumour cells grow it returns to its evolutionary earlier capabilities and all the recently acquired capabilities are stopped. It means, according to atavistic hypothesis, tumour cells show the characteristics that have similarity with many unicellular organisms that have evolved much earlier than the multicellular organism.And those unicellular organisms were capable of surviving in a oxygen free environment because at that time earth's environment was anoxic(without free oxygen).So, according to this theory tumour cells prefer oxygen free environment to grow. So, if any challenging condition of what a tumour cell prefer can be created ,then the tumour cells can be destroyed. That's why atavistic hypothesis predicts that high levels of oxygen might be an effective treatment for tumours.
So, The reasonable hypothesis or predictions that can be made as to why would the Atavistic hypothesis predict that high level of oxygen might be an effect treatment for tumours is the option no "C". i.e. Multicellular organisms inherited the core unicellular reproductive genes/gene network with minimal modification.