Peto’s Paradox is an ongoing observable mystery that there is not enough scientific evidence to verity the seems sensible logic where larger animals by having more cells, should have more cell divisions, which then implies more chance of mutations which positively correlated with cancer rate.
Explanation
Such observation could be explained in two ways which are widely accepted:
One, large animal tends to have lower basal metabolic rates (BMR), meaning they release less genetic toxics than smaller animal.
Two, from the study of elephants’ genes, scientists found out that they have 20 copies of p53 tumor suppressor gene. Compare to human and other smaller mammals which mostly has only 1 of it, it could be the cause of the longevity of their life.
Well there is an arising idea that the possibility of the existence of hypertumour. It said that since large animals have more mutations, it could be a chance that before the cancer cells could grow too big to threaten the life of big mammals, their rapid mutations give rise to new tumour cells, that solely fed on the original tumour cells. This drains the nutrients and energy of the original tumours which in turn cannot spread themselves to the body easily. There are no significant scientific proof of this theory though.