STREET DOGS: Cancer causes confound
The need to find explanations for why things happen makes it difficult to accept that sometimes bad things just happen, writes Michel Pireu
For the first time, I understood the ancients’ need to find explanations for why things happen. It’s a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. – Alanna Mitchell From George Johnson at Edge.org: Cancer is often described as a sped-up version of Darwinian evolution. Through a series of advantageous mutations, the tumour — this hopeful monster — becomes fitter and fitter within the ecosystem of your body. Some of the mutations are inherited while others are environmental. Much less talked about are the mutations that arise spontaneously from the random copying errors occurring every time a cell divides. In a paper published in Science, Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein calculated that two-thirds of the overall risk of cancer may come from these errors — entropic "bad luck". The paper set off a storm of outrage among environmentalists and public health officials, many of whom seem to have misunderstood the work or chose to misrepresent it. A rival mod...
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