Why does cancer develop and spread (metastasize) at the expense of the host organism ?
Tumor cells multiply indefinitely to form a tumor, which under 'appropriate' conditions spread and eventually kills the host.
It appears that the tumor is selected for, BUT, at the expense of the host organism.
This is Darwinian natural selection at play, for the tumor.
Why is the host not selected for survival ? Is it because it is the survival of multiple individual cells, whose regulation has gone awry versus a single host organism? A game of numbers where complexity is defeated.
The tumor per se (with mutations) does not kill the host, but the spread of the tumor to different sites in supportive microenvironments kills the host organism. So the mutation does not confer the survival of the tumor at the expense of the host per se, but the mutated cells functioning in specific microenvironments.
So is there more to the story of 'Natural selection of mutants', which could be context-dependent?
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