Originally posted by robbie carrobie
ah ah my trusty advisor, it cannot be the case that the universe and what we observe, although in a state of flux is in chaos! can it? oh no no, for, let us take the living cell as an example one again, for if this microcosm exhibited chaos then it could and would not function, but this is not the case! we observe a highly 'organised', and complex ...[text shortened]... ave been visited by Eris daughter of discordance and she has placed these thoughts before you!
Nope; let's see in brief the case regarding the cancerous cells. According to Alberts et al. the molecule basis of cancer is understood as following:
Cancers derive from single abnormal cells that begin to grow so quickly that they become tumors, and most cancers seem to be caused by changes in the base sequence of DNA. The mutations must be several instead of one in order to become a cell cancerous, and then the mutations that affect the rate of mutation are likely to cause cancer. This means that cancer is a kind of natural selection: cells that divide more rapidly than others can outcompete the others, just as organisms that reproduce more effectively than others become the most prevalent in a population.
Now I could safely say that I rest my case, since the process termed in Biology as “natural selection” is indeed chaotic due to the fact that all that we are monitoring is the successful feats of “engineering” of the living cell based on what looks to us like a set of rules of thumb whilst for the cell itself is merely “memory of its components of reality”… However I have to keep a bit up in order to decompose your argument in full.
When our healthy cells are under a full scale attack by the cancerous ones, the enemy proceeds to additional mutations that allow them to grow more rapidly and replace the other cancerous cells -and this is the reason why the cancerous cells become more and more aggressive when untreated they remain. But the treatments can too drive the evolution of the cancerous cells, and recurrent cancers are much more difficult to treat than the original cancer -and this means that the cancerous cells are very flexible even whenever their environment becomes a true hell for them, therefore we can safely assume that they are quite fit to survive even when their so called by you "order" is under attack by our treatments, which to the cancerous cells are equivalent to a chaotic environment.
Today we know that most cancers have environmental causes, therefore your theory about order is again dismissed, because order is a rare bird at every given (everchanging) environment. In fact the different kinds of cancers can vary in frequency by as much as two orders of magnitude in different populations, therefore today it is accepted that there are indeed local environmental causes.
Therefore, since cancer appears to result from mutations that allow cells to divide inappropriately and from mutations that prevent a cell from dying when it should, we can assume that the cells have a detection system that picks up mutations and prevents cell division until the damage is repaired. If the repair doesn't occur within a certain amount of time, the cell can destruct itself. The mutations that inactivate this suicide "program" (I use the word program for my convenience and not because I beleive that the cell is a computer) allow defective cells to survive and become cancerous. Once more, this is simply a cause-effect process and proves that the existence of the so call “order” is a myth: whatever actually takes place is a reaction that enables the living cell to “live” normally as long as its “engineering” is not seriously derailed due to mutations in it and/ or due to local environmental causes.
Finally, most cancers are metastatic, and these ones are deadlier than they would be if they were simply fast growing well localized masses of cells. As you see, even the cancerous cells do react according to chaos instead of order.
Therefore when we observe the living cell we do not observe "order" but a set of reactions that they enable its survival. A survival that can be cancelled anytime anywhere anyhow due to the fact that the environment itself is chaotic -and this means that the cell can anytime anywhere anyhow become unable to react "the correct way". So we cannot state that there is order amongst the given chaos -we can merely say that in the given chaos the cell is able to survive due to its "memory of triumphant mutations" for as long as it is capable to balance (react accurately) on its rope -and there is no safety net once it starts falling.
I wish I were ignorant of this specific chaotic process; a tumor on the brain killed Marias' mother on October 17, and our good doctor answered our questiones and backed us up with bibliography in full;
Aletheia
23 Nov '09 06:29
Back to Top