A Mathematical Explination for Cancer

This is an answer to a question on an unrelated thread [1]... No, unfortunately not. Rather, again unfortunately, it provides the answer as to why this disease will, most likely, remain deadly. I say most likely because who knows what somebody might think of that might get around its basic problem, but that would be very difficult because cancer is a very different kind of disease. Most diseases are either degenerative, that is, caused by breakdowns over time of body parts, or invasive, caused by microorganisms, bacteria or viruses. Cancer is very different because it derives, at least from the understanding provided by this mathematics, from a rather weird yet natural process called cellular optimization.

Those are two words not used very often, so let me explain. The optimization part simply put means that your body is always trying its best, somehow, to not go extinct; specifically, in this case, it wants to reproduce. You usually think of your body as one whole thing, so its reproduction involves replicating itself, all the different kinds of tens of trillions of cells in your body. A whole person made up of all the different kinds of cells replicates another whole organism, albeit infant size, made up of all those different kinds of cells.

Where cancer comes from requires us to understand that the body is, indeed, made up of all these different kinds of cells that collectively comprise all the different kinds of tissues in the body. At some point, rather than the whole body reproducing, the cancer cells start to reproduce on their own. The impetus to do so is very ancient. I will have to bring up evolution here, which is how this mathematics explains the process, via the mathematical explanation for selective evolution. This is not evolution of humans, per se, but rather ancient evolution of microorganisms. The first life forms go back over four and a half billion years as primitive single cells. For the first few billion years, there were only single-celled organisms. If you Google 'microorganisms', it may give you a better sense of what they are. Bacteria are a clear example, but there are other kinds, such as those you might see in pond water if you used a microscope.

We humans and most animals are multi-cellular animals, consisting of many single cells. At some point in evolution, the single cells 'got together' to form the first multi-cellular organisms called the colonial organisms. Some of those are still around today: algae, corals and jelly fish. When cells join together to form multi-cellular organisms, those generally reproduce as a whole. Because of this, there are DNA controls that keep the individual cells from reproducing, for such would be non-productive for the body as a whole. If your pancreas cells started reproducing on their own as their own little colony of cells, it would be very bad for you as a whole person, as they would end up, most likely, invading other parts of the body. That is not to say that the cells of the body don’t replace each other over time in some tissues, but they do it in a very controlled way, not growing exponentially and without limits as in free living single celled bacteria, which you can see on YouTube in some neat videos.

When cells get cancerous, however, they grow just like free living single celled bacteria, in exponential fashion and, as dictated by the fitness equation I have thrown up here every now and then, as fast as they can, with as high a birth rate as they are capable of. Often cancer is caused by hormones: sometimes artificial, as with steroids, and sometimes via natural hormones, such as when cancers are caused by life failures - it has been documented that men who have broken up with women are more prone to certain cancers. In effect such hormones are telling the body’s cells via ancient DNA information mechanisms, "You are not going to reproduce as a whole, so try reproducing individually." And off go the cells, rapidly metastasizing and forming tumors, populations of cells growing without limit, all of this much to the detriment of the body as a whole.

This is, evidently, not the only cause of cancer. There are many potential carcinogens - cancer causing chemicals - that are not hormones.

Curing cancer would require a tinkering of the molecular biology that is very difficult, due to the inherent complexity in cellular signaling that is both not very well understood, and, where it is known, is very complicated and difficult to control. I wish I could say differently. I suppose it is not very cheering to have a mathematics that tells you that cancer is near impossible to cure. One would prefer knowledge that could have real results rather than just theorizing as to the etiology or cause of cancer. Perhaps this piece of information, though, might possibly provide a direction for research to go in.