癌症的返祖理论认为，癌症的出现和发展是通过细胞表型回复到更祖先的类型，基因组和表观遗传的变化使最近进化的遗传模块失活并激活古老的生存机制。该理论旨在解释已知的癌症特征以及尽管基因突变具有随机性，但癌症的可预测进展的悖论。 Lineweaver及其同事最近提出了串行返祖模型（SAM），这是返祖理论的增强版本，该模型表明癌症进展涉及多个返祖逆转，其中细胞在进化阶段中退化，首先失去最近进化的特征，然后重新激活原始特征。 Warburg 效应是 SAM 的关键特征之一，即癌细胞在有氧的情况下上调糖酵解和乳酸生成，而不是使用氧化磷酸化。它与大气氧化之前生活在地球上的古代细胞的新陈代谢有关。这篇综述解决了癌症代谢是否可以被视为返祖的问题。通过分析癌症代谢的几个已知特征，我们得出的结论是，这种版本的返祖理论没有为癌症研究提供足够的概念框架。癌症代谢跨越了整个代谢状态范围，这些状态不能通过依次回复到古代状态来完全解释。此外，我们探究癌症代谢的本质并在 SAM 框架内讨论其特征。

The atavistic theory of cancer posits that cancer emerges and progresses through the reversion of cellular phenotypes to more ancestral types with genomic and epigenetic changes deactivating recently evolved genetic modules and activating ancient survival mechanisms. This theory aims at explaining the known cancer hallmarks and the paradox of cancer's predictable progression despite the randomness of genetic mutations. Lineweaver and colleagues recently proposed the Serial Atavism Model (SAM), an enhanced version of the atavistic theory, which suggests that cancer progression involves multiple atavistic reversions where cells regress through evolutionary stages, losing recently evolved traits first and reactivating primitive ones later. The Warburg effect, where cancer cells upregulate glycolysis and lactate production in the presence of oxygen instead of using oxidative phosphorylation, is one of the key feature of the SAM. It is associated with the metabolism of ancient cells living on Earth before the oxygenation of the atmosphere. This review addresses the question of whether cancer metabolism can be considered as an atavistic reversion. By analyzing several known characteristics of cancer metabolism, we reach the conclusion that this version of the atavistic theory does not provide an adequate conceptual frame for cancer research. Cancer metabolism spans a whole spectrum of metabolic states which cannot be fully explained by a sequential reversion to an ancient state. Moreover, we interrogate the nature of cancer metabolism and discuss its characteristics within the framework of the SAM.