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High-Speed Evolutionary Mechanisms in Cancer Cells—Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About Them?

A truck hit Rich Jacobs at 65 miles an hour and sent him skidding into the ditch. He had a concussion and was banged up, but the CT scan showed that he had thyroid nodules which turned out to be cancer.

Thus began Rich’s painful and frustrating and sometimes outraging journey with cancer. Rich has now done almost 3000 interviews on his Finding Genius podcast and we are close to finishing a book on cancer that I’m co-writing.

On this episode of his podcast, Rich reviews my PDF on the current thinking on cancer. He does a great job of summarizing my thoughts and findings.

● How we are losing the war on cancer and the war against bacteria.
● How the current misunderstanding of high speed evolution is keeping us stuck in the mud.
● How symbiogenesis creates and entirely new type of creature
● How bacteria rearrange their genomes to become more resistant
● How our environment, the effects of what we eat and drink and breathe can be passed on to future generations
● How we are “8 to 10 percent virus” and what that means for cancer and evolution
● How no one knows exactly what your microbiome (all the little creatures that make up YOU) does…other than keep us alive!

I appreciate Rich taking the time to give this lay person’s review of my PDF and helping me spread the message of the purposeful and conscious nature of cancer and evolution.

Why are stage 4 cancer patients not much better off today than in 1930, despite the U.S. government spending $250 billion on cancer research?

Why are we losing the antibiotics race against bacteria, with superbugs evolving in a matter of minutes?

In an interview with Richard Jacobs, Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, explains, “These problems stem from an inadequate understanding of evolution itself…A prime reason cancer treatments fail is that the tumor cells evolve at tremendous speed by some kind of self-governing process.”

Even in the most popular, best-selling books on evolution, critical mechanisms Read more »

Was Adam A Real Dude And Does It Really Matter?

If you ask most irreligious people about Adam and Eve, they’ll say that they are fictional characters in a fanciful story about an apple and a snake.

If you ask the people I grew up with about Adam and Eve, they’ll tell you that they were the father and mother of mankind 6,000 years ago and that modern anthropology is a big fake.

Neither one of these answers is adequate or even helpful to the strained relationship between science and religion. 25 years ago, when I was a 20-something discussion leader at an adventurous mega church, I asked a group of people (most of whom were not Christians): Read more »

Who Knew Water to be this Controversial?


Little do most people know that water appears to have remarkable properties that your middle school science textbooks told you nothing about, including memory and a “fourth phase”. This appears to have deep implications for medicine and biology.

Gerald Pollack maintains an active laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the author of Muscles and Molecules, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life and The Fourth Phase of Water. We discuss a mere scandalous run-in with Nature Magazine that resulted in the demise of a certain researcher’s career.

Hear this interview as a podcast – https://evo2.org/podcasts/who-knew-water-to-be-this-controversial/

Donuts in the Oncology Ward


Richard Jacobs of the Finding Genius Podcast has written a new book called Finding Genius: Understanding Cancer: 30 Questions, 70 Geniuses, 200+ Amazing Insights in which he interviews 70 scientists covering 30 questions about cancer research overlayed with his own personal experience of thyroid cancer. Hint: The cancer treatment ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Beware of donuts and snack machines.

Hear this interview as a podcast – https://evo2.org/podcasts/donuts-in-the-oncology-ward/

The evolution guy who attracted 800 on a FREEZING January night

In 2010, James Shapiro gave a talk on evolution at FERMILAB, the particle physics lab near Chicago. An astonishing 800 people showed up on a frigid January night. The audience was enthusiastic.

Clearly evolution was not just a topic for propeller-heads. At some level everybody wants to know: “Where did it all come from?”

I had been following Shapiro’s work for 4 years but had never seen him in person. After a lively Q&A, the hangers-on moved to the cafeteria and he started answering questions.

Suddenly one guy “got” what Dr. Shapiro had been saying all night long.

“You mean the mutations aren’t random???” he asked.

Read more »

50th Anniversary of Nixon’s War on Cancer w/ Azra Raza

December 21, 2021, is the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon declaring that cancer was going to be ended by 1976. Many media outlets are celebrating progress when, in fact, the progress isn’t all that impressive. Azra Raza, Columbia university oncologist, speaks candidly about her entry into the cancer field at age 24, the years that have passed, and incredibly promising research that has now commenced from the 60,000 tissue samples that she has collected from her patients across 30 years of practice. Here she describes her quest to catch the first cancer cell red-handed as it is forming.

Hear this interview as a podcast at https://evo2.org/podcasts/50th-anniversary-of-nixons-war-on-cancer-w-azra-raza/

LIVE DEBATE: Richard Dawkins vs. Denis Noble

LIVE DEBATE Richard Dawkins vs. Denis Noble: Is The Selfish Gene holding back medicine and cancer cures? The world’s most incendiary evolutionary biologist asks if we need to rethink DNA.

June 4, 2022 @ “How the Light Gets In” UK conference

Richard Dawkins is author of the world’s best selling evolution book, “The Selfish Gene” and is one of the most famous intellectuals today. Denis Noble was on Dawkins’ PhD review committee at Oxford and is one of the most respected scientists in the world.

Noble was the first person to model a human organ on the computer, the heart, which led to the development of the pacemaker. His work with heart genetics convinced him that standard evolutionary theory has major flaws. Noble organized the 2016 Royal Society Evolution Conference, which galvanized the field.

“How the Light Gets In” announces:

Dawkins’ Selfish Gene has been hugely influential, both within evolutionary biology and in the wider public sphere. It’s a beautifully simple story: genes and not organisms drive evolutionary change. But critics argue the story is simplistic. The effect of a gene is not always the same and as is dependent on its host and the cell environment. DNA does not come neatly divided into individual genes. And in 2010 the renowned biologist EO Wilson and others revived the case for group selection. Some are now arguing that the Selfish Gene paradigm is holding back medical research.

Is it time to move on and acknowledge that Dawkins’ theory is not the whole story? Might his theory be making a fundamental mistake in reducing humans to machines? Or does the Selfish Gene remain a remarkably powerful and accurate account of who we are?

Get tickets here: “How the Light Gets In” UK conference

Review of Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Fortified

The Definitive book on Why Evolution Works as Well as it Does

Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Fortified is James Shapiro’s magnum opus, a triumph of 50 years of intense scholarship – from the man who discovered that bacteria can restructure their own DNA.

If you’re brand new to evolution, or not scientifically adept, feel free to skip this book. But for intermediate or advanced students, it’s a feast.

Read more »

Agency of the Cell: Convergence between Origin of Life, Evolution, Cognition and Cancer

Presented at the American Association of Cancer Research “Evolutionary Dynamics” Conference, Tampa, Florida, 15 March 2022.

Poster Session PDF

Abstract: All cells exhibit agency and evolve purposefully. This is why cancer has outwitted doctors for 100 years and why Stage 3-4 patients are no better in 2022 than in 1930. Evolution was presumed to be random and purposeless, yet all cells possess cognition (Shapiro 2020). Cell behavior is normally algorithmic, but uniquely responds to novel situations. This is what makes evolution (and cancer) possible.

Cognition—sensing and responding to the environment—is the unifying principle behind the genetic code, origin of life, evolution, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and cancer. Thus the central question in biology is: What is the nature and origin of cognition?

A solution to the origin of the genetic code, for which the presenter’s organization offers a $10 million prize, announced at the Royal Society in 2019, is an unsolved cognition problem. This choice is a non-deterministic action of a free agent with sensory capacity and memory. It is not computable from prior states. As well as reading and reacting to its environment, it anticipates future threats, chooses goals and reasons inductively. Computers do none of these things.

This new model explains the futility of reducing most diseases to a single random or algorithmic component, and suggests we should treat cancer as an autonomous purposeful agent with unique identity and capacity to choose.

Poster Session PDF

Biology transcends the limits of computation (PubMed 2021)

References

American Association for Cancer Research -_Special Conference: Evolutionary Dynamics in Carcinogenesis and Response to Therapy – References

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