You *can* teach an old dog new tricks

…Tricks like a dog cancer cell becoming an independent pathogen and spreading through the dog population. Drop everything and go read Carl Zimmer’s post about the recent discovery of a dog cancer cell lineage that has left behind its multicellular ancestry. Rather like HeLa cells, except in the wild without human help. If I thought that “phylum” and “phylum-level bodyplan” were inviolable, unchanging character complexes (which I don’t), this example of a super-phyletic macroevolutionary change, on microevolutionary timescales, would rock my world.