During the early 1980s both cancer biology and epidemiological methods were being transformed. In 1984 the leading cancer epidemiologist Richard Peto – who, in 1981, had published the landmark Causes of Cancer with Richard Doll – wrote a short chapter on “The need for ignorance in cancer research”, in which the worlds of epidemiology and speculative Darwinian biology met. His reflections on how evolutionary theory related to cancer have become known as “Peto’s paradox”, whilst his articulation of “black box epidemiology” provided the logic of subsequent practice in the field. We reprint this sparkling and prescient example of biologically-informed epidemiological theorising at its best in this issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology, together with four commentaries that focus on different aspects of its rich content. Here were provide some contextual background to the 1984 chapter, and our own speculations regarding various paradoxes in cancer epidemiology. We suggest that one reason for the relative lack of progress in indentifying novel modifiable causes of cancer over the last 40 years may reflect such exposures being ubiquitous within environments, and discuss the lessons for epidemiology that would follow from this.

20 世纪 80 年代初，癌症生物学和流行病学方法都在发生转变。1984 年，著名癌症流行病学家理查德·佩托 (Richard Peto) 在 1981 年与理查德·多尔 (Richard Doll) 合作出版了具有里程碑意义的《癌症原因》一书，他写了一篇关于“癌症研究中无知的必要性”的短章，其中阐述了流行病学和推测性达尔文生物学的世界遇见了。他对与癌症相关的进化论的反思被称为“佩托悖论”，而他对“黑匣子流行病学”的阐述则为该领域随后的实践提供了逻辑。我们在本期《欧洲流行病学杂志》中重印了这个基于生物学的流行病学理论的闪闪发光且有先见之明的例子，并附有四篇评论，重点关注其丰富内容的不同方面。这里提供了 1984 年章节的一些背景知识，以及我们自己对癌症流行病学中各种悖论的推测。我们认为，过去 40 年来在识别新的可改变癌症病因方面相对缺乏进展的一个原因可能反映了这种暴露在环境中普遍存在，并讨论了由此得出的流行病学教训。