Systems biology of cancer: entropy, disorder, and selection-driven evolution to independence, invasion and “swarm intelligence”

In honor of Darwin Day, find and read an interesting science paper.

"Besides the minority of cancers arising from direct exogenous causes such as radiation, carcinogens, viruses, or inflammation, the majority of cancers do not originate from single obvious events but rather from multiple chance events in the normal life of our 3 × 1013cells. We link these events to the increasing entropy in the cell physiology and to the noise in our cell metabolism, which may initiate the process in some cells. This can lead to the major reverse biological transition from cells in pluricellular organisms, which obey constrains of the whole, to unicellular organisms, which independently strive to survive and multiply. After this transition to independence, the same causal mechanisms coupled to a Darwinian selection will cause the evolution to progression, invasion, metastasis, and in a few cases immortality as infectious agents. '


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843370/


_- Steve