Toward Cultural Oncology: The Evolutionary Information Dynamics of Cancer

Wallace, Rodrick; Wallace, Deborah; Wallace, Robert G.

doi:10.1023/a:1024662223398

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Forlenza and Baum (2000) explore the effects of stress on the full spectrum of tumor control in higher animals, ranging from DNA damage and control, to apoptosis, immune surveillance, and mutation rate. Elsewhere (R. Wallace et al, 2003) we argue that this elaborate tumor control strategy, particularly in large animals, must be at least as cognitive as the immune system itself, which is one of its components. That is, some comparison must be made with an internal picture of a 'healthy' cell, and a choice made as to response: none, attempt DNA repair, trigger programmed cell death, engage in full-blown immune attack.…”

Section: Tumor Controlmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Punctuated Equilibrium in Statistical Models of Generalized Coevolutionary Resilience: How Sudden Ecosystem Transitions Can Entrain Both Phenotype Expression and Darwinian Selection

Wallace¹,

Wallace

2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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We argue that mesoscale ecosystem resilience shifts akin to sudden phase transitions in physical systems can entrain similarly punctuated events of gene expression on more rapid time scales, and, in part through such means, slower changes induced by selection pressure, triggering punctuated equilibrium Darwinian evolutionary transitions on geologic time scales. The approach reduces ecosystem, gene expression, and Darwinian genetic dynamics to a least common denominator of information sources interacting by crosstalk at markedly differing rates. Pettini's 'topological hypothesis', via a homology between information source uncertainty and free energy density, generates a statistical model of sudden coevolutionary phase transition based on the Rate Distortion and Shannon-McMillan Theorems of information theory which links all three levels. Holling's (1992) extended keystone hypothesis regarding the particular role of mesoscale phenomena in entraining both slower and faster dynamical structures produces the result. A main theme is the necessity of a cognitive paradigm for gene expression, mirroring I. Cohen's cognitive approach to immune function. Invocation of the necessary conditions imposed by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory enables us to penetrate one layer more deeply before needing to impose a phenomenological system of 'Onsager relation' recursive coevolutionary stochastic differential equations. Extending the development to second order via a large deviations argument may permit modeling the influence of human cultural structures on ecosystems.

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Section: Tumor Controlmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Evolutionary process is vastly speeded up in tumorigenesis, which nonetheless seems amenable to similar analysis (e.g. Wallace et al, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punctuated Equilibrium in Statistical Models of Generalized Coevolutionary Resilience: How Sudden Ecosystem Transitions Can Entrain Both Phenotype Expression and Darwinian Selection

Wallace¹,

Wallace

2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Forlenza and Baum (2000) explore the effects of stress on the full spectrum of tumor control, ranging from DNA damage and control, to apoptosis, immune surveillance, and mutation rate. Wallace et al (2003) argue that this elaborate tumor control strategy, in large animals, must be at least as cognitive as the immune system itself, one of its prin-2.3 Protein folding regulation 13 cipal components: some comparison must be made with an internal picture of a healthy cell, and a choice made as to response, i.e., none, attempt DNA repair, trigger programmed cell death, engage in full-blown immune attack. This is, from the Atlan/Cohen perspective, the essence of cognition, and clearly involves the recruitment of a comprehensive set of cognitive subprocesses into a larger, highly tunable, dynamic structure.…”

Section: Tumor Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Wallace

2013

Preprint

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A survey of the cultural psychology and related literatures suggests that Western biomedicine's fascination with atomistic, individual-oriented, interventions is a cultural artifact that may have little consonance with complex, subtle, multiscale, multilevel, social, ecological, or biological realities. Other cultural traditions may, in fact, view atomistic strategies as inherently unreal. A contrary perspective -similar to that of health promotion -implies that the most effective medical or public health interventions must be analogously patterned across scale and level of organization: 'magic strategies' will almost always be synergistically, and often emergently, more effective than 'magic bullets'. The result can be formally derived in a relatively straightforward manner using an adaptation of the Black-Scholes econometric model applied to the metabolic cost of bioregulation under uncertainty. Multifactorial interventions focused at the human 'keystone' ecosystem level of mesoscale social and geographic groupings may be particularly effective.The analysis indicates that there is unlikely to be much in the way of 'simple' chronic disease. That is, serious comorbidity is usually inevitable, and may often be a consequence of therapeutic intervention itself. Study suggests that pairing of medical and prevention strategies with appropriate mesoscale neighborhood/social network interventions would:(1) Damp down unwanted treatment side effects.(2) Make the therapeutic alliance between practitioner and patient more effective. (3) Improve patient compliance. (4) Enhance placebo effect.(5) In the context of real stress reduction, synergistically improve the actual biological impacts of medical interventions or prevention strategies.Much of this is well-known and has been repeatedly described across a vast array of public health and health policy literatures, but the results will be developed here from first principles, involving the interaction of cognitive and environmental phenomena across both scale and levels of organization, echoing something of the pioneering insights of Maturana and Varela. With some added complexity, the analysis can be extended to developmental trajectories, in a large sense, through a kind v PeerJ PrePrints | https://peerj.com/preprints/8v2/ | v2 received: 21

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“…Dembo and Zeitouni 1998), imposition of invariance under a renormalization transform in the implicit parameter r on the dual information source of the generalized ergodic stochastic resonance characterizing the array as a whole leads to expectation of both a critical point in K, K C , reflecting a phase transition to or from collective behaviour across the entire array, and of power laws for system behaviour near K C . See Wilson (1971) for calculational details, which are standard, and Wallace (1998, 1999), Wallace et al (2003) or Wallace (2005a) for a more complete application to information sources.…”

Section: Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

Plague and power relations

Wallace¹

2007

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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Public policy and economic practice, quintessential expressions of institutional cognition, create an opportunity structure constituting a tunable, highly patterned, 'non-white noise' in a generalized epidemiological stochastic resonance that can efficiently amplify unhealthy living and working conditions, particularly within highly concentrated, marginalized urban populations, to evoke infectious disease outbreaks. This is especially true for the infections carried by socially generated 'risk behaviours' which are usually adaptations to histories of resource deprivation or marginalization. A number of local epidemics originating in such ecological keystone communities may subsequently undergo a policy and structure-driven phase transition to become a coherent pandemic, a spreading plague which can entrain more affluent populations into the disease ecology of marginalization. We use this approach to contrast the ecological resilience of apartheid and egalitarian social systems, and apply these perspectives to the forthcoming social and geographical diffusion of multiple drug resistant (MDR) HIV from present AIDS epicentres to the rest of the United States.

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Toward Cultural Oncology: The Evolutionary Information Dynamics of Cancer

Cited by 25 publications

References 46 publications

Punctuated Equilibrium in Statistical Models of Generalized Coevolutionary Resilience: How Sudden Ecosystem Transitions Can Entrain Both Phenotype Expression and Darwinian Selection

Punctuated Equilibrium in Statistical Models of Generalized Coevolutionary Resilience: How Sudden Ecosystem Transitions Can Entrain Both Phenotype Expression and Darwinian Selection

Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Plague and power relations

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