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Cancer is a serious health problem worldwide. The introduction of an ecological and evolutionary perspective of malignant neoplasms is aimed at a more systemic and objective approach to the nature of this heterogeneous group of diseases. With the aim of an approach to the most generalized ideas existing at present on the ecologicalevolutionary perspective of cancer, the present systematic review was carried out. Cancer is a universal phenomenon that affects all forms of multicellular organisms. The risk of developing malignant tumors is closely related to the patterns of life histories traced by the evolutionary process according to the adaptive need of organisms to the different ecological niches they occupy. There is an association between the evolutionary development of protective mechanisms against malignant tumors and the evolutionary cost of these in terms of reproductive success. Reproductive success seems to depend on body size, the distribution of energy towards basic processes and the basal risk of cancer. Natural selection favors effective mechanisms that protect against cancer as long as they allow an optimization of other traits that determine adaptive success. The conclusions derived from these ecological and evolutionary principles should serve to better characterize the factors that depend both on the biological and environmental factors that influence the risk of carcinogenesis. More than 90% of the increase in basal risk of cancer, even in natural species, is due to human activity, and therefore, can be modified.

Currently, cancer, and the process from which it develops, carcinogenesis, is defined as a variety of somatic evolution, which compiles exactly with the most elementary and universal Darwinian laws. 13 Evolutionary dynamics in which deterministic and random forces intervene, imbricated in a complex ecological framework. Biological and evolutionary investigations of cancer have led to promising results; and contradictions. Two paradigms of carcinogenesis from an ecological-evolutionary perspective have been raised in the last decades: The theory of somatic mutation and the theory of adaptive oncogenesis. The first, predominant, proposes that a tumour develops as sequential and progressive accumulation of mutations that increase