Buried lede, turns out evolution can tune mutation rates, which will in turn tune the evolution rate.
Sharks, for example, don't get cancer much, because they can afford to evolve very very slowly.
On the flip side, very large animals must evolve slowly to avoid being offed by cancer. Very very large animals, especially combined with their long generations, must effectively stop evolving entirely. Consequently, when the environment changes, they die.
In the short term, being larger lets you win both intraspecific and interspecific contests. In the long term, it gets you culled. A real shame.
If the genome wasn't such heinous spaghetti code, evolution would regularly tune mutation rates in specific tissues.
Human brains are under such strong selection pressure that they've adapted to mutate twice. After conception brain genes are shuffled a second time. Generally this makes you stupid or insane, lol. However...
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