What I've Been Reading

Nevertheless, mosquitoes and water provide narrow paths from one host to the next. Mosquitoes, for example, are not syringes. They are fully functional animals that have their own immune systems, and even those microbes that can manage to evade mosquitoes' defenses will be limited to those in the blood. Similarly, water generally passes on those microbes that live in the digestive tract. Hunting and butchering, in contrast provide superhighways connecting a hunting species directly with the microbes in every tissue of the prey. 

I've never become completely accustomed to exactly what is required to prepare meat for consumption.  We take for granted what it means to remove hair and skin from a dead animal, the effort needed to separate meat from many bones distributed in an animal to support its movement. We forget how many parts of an animal must be negotiated to get the prime cuts: the lungs, the spleen, the cartilage. Watching the process on the dirt floor of a hut or on leaves spread out on the ground in a hunting camp, seeing the blood-covered hands that separate the various parts of the animal and hearing bits of discarded meat and bone hit the floor still shocks me. It also helps to remind me of the microbial significance of the event. 

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe; who is aptly called the Indiana Jones of virus hunters. 

Max was little over three years, when I first listened to Nathan Wolfe interview - Waiting For The Next Plague on Edge. That was on January 30th 2009 (Yes, I was following Edge everyday that time). 

Fast forward to March 2020 - exactly 11 years and 2 months later, after the COVID pandemic hit, I went to my basement to dig through my "preparations" for a future pandemic. Surprisingly, I found masks, medical supplies etc., which I bought in 2009 after listening to Nathan's interview. 

For once, I was happy with myself that I acted on what learned and didn't just accumulated knowledge for the sake of knowing. Nothing matters in life than action. 

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

- Buddha 

In other words, I was expecting a pandemic for over a decade. 

• Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck's discovery. 
• Category Four agents represents the final steps on the journey to become a human-specific microbe. Whether or not monkeypox has the potential to join the pantheon of our Category Four agents remains to be seen. Microbes that reach Category Four can live exclusively in humans while simultaneously continuing to liv in animal reservoirs. Monkeypox still ranks as a Category Three agent, but that could certainly change. 
• Checkout how chytrid fungus has resulted in global grog deaths and in some cases extinction of entire grog species, a tragic loss of wildlife on our planet. What happened with the chyrid fungus also gives us important clues to a larger phenomenon that affects much more than amphibians. 
• The number of livestock on the planet now boggles the mind but the way that they're transformed into meat also differs in important ways from how it's been done since domestication began. Historically, a single animal would feed a family or at most a village. With the evident of processed meats, a single hot dog consumed at a baseball game can consist of multiple species (pig, turkey, cattle) and contain meat derived from hundred of animals. When you bite into that hot dog, you're literally biting into what was only a few decades ago an entire farm. Combining the meat of many animals and then distributing it to many people has obvious consequences. Connecting thousands of animals with thousands of consumers means that an average meat today will consume bit of millions of animals during their lifetime. What previously was a direct connection between one animal and one consumer is now a massively interconnected network of animal parts and those that eat them. And while cooking the meat certainly eliminates many of the risks, the massive number of interactions increases the potential that a rouge agent will make the jump. 
• Understand the term "emerging genes".
• Only a trivial fraction of the global ape population are under the watchful eye of woefully underfunded primatologists. If we're relying on these scientists to regularly capture the animal epidemics that could signal future human plagues, then we're destined to fail. To truly catch epidemics, we'll need to do more. 
• Please fund and support people who listen to "viral chatter".
• Steve Quake, a scientist working to change the ways we can forecast microbial evolution is not a microbiologist at all but rather a physics-trained bioengineer. 
• It is important to understand that all viruses are not our enemies. Safe viruses are some of the best friends we have in fighting the deadly ones. 
• Using one microbe to prevent another microbe from causing disease is pretty amazing. This is something that's increasingly explored in the nascent field of virotherapy. 
• Consider the human body. Only about one out every ten cells between your hat and shoes is human - the other nine belong to masses of bacteria that coat our skin, live in ur guts, and thrive in our mouths. The bacteria and viruses represented by thousands of species will outnumber the human genes every time. 
• There are gentle microbes out there - bugs that helps us, defend us, and live quietly within us doing no harm at all. If we could accurately determine which of those microbes on our bodies and in the environment were beneficial to us and which are rogue, we'd find something pleasantly surprising: the harmful ones are certainly in the minority. The goal of public health should not be to have a completely sterile world but to find the rogue elements and control them. A key part of addressing the nasty microbes will be to cultivate the microbes that help us. One day soon, the way we protect ourselves may be by propping up with bugs that live within us rather than knocking them down. 
• One day we may be able to rank the greatest future risks for pandemics, but for now we cannot. We know that they'll almost certainly be microbes that come from animals and that some spots around the world pose greater risks for their entry. 
• Among the most substantive risks for the emergence of a novel pandemics is the close contact between humans and animals, particularly wild mammals. Changing human behavior to decrease this sort of contact can begin long before we have an ideal prediction systems in place. 

The term "Risk Literacy" is an important one. The idea that part of the solution is having an informed public that can understand and appropriately interpret information on pandemics.  

Risk literacy, the ability to distinguish between different levels of severity, is not only for policy makers. Effective response to natural disasters depends on individual people and how well they stay calm and follow instructions. The constant barrage of threats articulated by the media has led to chronic risk habituation. The only way to break that logjam is for everyone to understand risk, to be able to assess the different kinds of disasters, and respond appropriately to them.  

Widespread risk literacy will help the public support the massive government expenditures that will be needed to appropriately predict and prevent pandemics. It will give a sense of how best to expend funds. 

From April 2001 to August 2002, a period which includes the 9/11 attacks, it's estimated that around eight thousand people died from terrorism. From April 2009 to August 2010, the same period of time but eight years later, over eighteen thousand people were confirmed dead from H1N1 pandemic alone - a pandemic dismissed by the public as insignificant. And that number is certainly an underestimate. 

I'm not claiming that proportionality in deaths is the only factor we should take into account when preparing for threats. But the trillions of dollars spent to prevent terrorism seem wildly disproportionate to actual risks when put the threats in proper context. 

 

The number one issue and the only issue which caused COVID and will cause future pandemics are our brutal relationship with animals; our fellow sentient creatures who we share this beautiful blue planet. 

Our mindless diet focusing only on tradition, gastrointestinal pleasures and sheer habit with no remorse for billions of animal sufferings nor our own health nor an understanding of that significant microbial event we leash every time we kill and chew meat. The truth is even after 18 months of COVID pandemic majority of the sapiens don't want to hear this nor don't want to change their diet. 

So, I am waiting and preparing for the next plague or worse, the final plague. 

Humans Were Born to Carry Weight on Our Backs

After the Arctic, I traveled to meet researchers at Harvard, who told me that, compared to most other mammals, humans are “athletically pathetic.” We’re slow and weak. But we are damn good at endurance running and carrying. We can’t go fast. But we can go far — especially in hot weather. On a hot day, a relatively fit human will beat most other mammals in a distance race — lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc. And we’re also the only animal that can carry well.

Endurance running and carrying are, quite literally, acts that made us human. The human body is built the way it is so that we could slowly but surely run down prey for miles and miles in the heat until the animal toppled over from exhaustion. Then we’d kill it and carry it back to camp. This is why we have two legs, springy arches in our feet, big butt muscles, sweat glands across our body, no fur, short torsos, and strong grips.

But as we evolved, running was relatively rare. It was reserved mostly for hunts. Modern-day tribes like the Tarahumara, for example, never run for the fun of it. Running is reserved for rare hunts and religious ceremonies, the Harvard anthropologists (who’d embedded themselves with the Tarahumara) explained.

Carrying, on the other hand, is something we humans did all the time as we evolved. So all the evidence suggests that we were more so “born to carry.”

[---]

After the Arctic, I traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend a few days with Jason McCarthy, a former Green Beret who founded GORUCK, a company that makes beautiful backpacks built to military specs.

“You never run in war without weight. Never,” said McCarthy. “But you’re always rucking. No matter what. Always. Rucking is the foundational skill of being a Special Forces soldier. Any soldier for that matter.”

“Ruck” is both a noun and a verb. It’s a thing and an action. It’s military speak for the heavy backpack that carries all of the items a soldier needs to fight a war. And “to ruck” or “rucking” is the act of marching that ruck in war, or as a form of training for soldiers or civilians to get really, really fit.

One morning Jason and I each loaded about 45 pounds into his GORUCK packs and rucked into GORUCK HQ. It worked my lungs and muscles. He described rucking as, “cardio for people who hate to run, and lifting for people who hate the gym.” It corrects for body type. If you’re too big, it’ll lean you out. Too skinny? It’ll add muscle to your frame. This, he explained, is why carrying is the foundation of military fitness training. It builds humans who one hour can hike 75 pounds of gear up a mountain and the next powerfully breach an enemy cell.

- More here from Michael Easter, the author of new book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

How Whales Resist Cancer

However, given that cell division may lead to errors, larger animals should get more cancer. After all, bigger body, more cells/cell divisions, more possible mutations. Enter a paradox.

[---]

If we look within species, there seems to be a positive correlation between cancer risk and body size. Larger individuals → increased risk. But, when we look across species, this correlation breaks down. An elephant does not get more cancer than a mouse. This apparent resistance of larger-sized species to cancer is known as Peto’s paradox, named after English statistician Richard Peto who first observed it in 1977.

[---]

Evolution, it seems, has gifted the larger species some extra protection.

A new study now exposes some of those gifts by looking at the largest of animal groups: cetaceans. The whales.

The researchers went looking for clues in the genetic data of 7 species of cetacean (bottlenose dolphin, orca, beluga, Yangtze river dolphin, the sperm whale, common minke whale, and the bowhead whale). They also looked at 8 other species to have good points of comparison (cow, pig, dog, horse, microbat, human, mouse, and the African elephant).

They started with data on known tumor suppressor genes and then scoured the cetacean DNA for traces of those.

The scientist found evidence of positive selection for seven of the tumor-suppressing genes in whales: CXCR2 in all cetaceans and DAB2, ADAMTS8, DSC3, EPHA2, TMPRSS11A, ANXA1 specifically in baleen whales (which happen to be the largest of all whales). These genes are known to be involved (in humans) in cancers such as lung neoplasm, leukemia, teratocarcinoma, as well as in immune system disorders.

Another interesting finding was that cetaceans genes had a higher turnover rate, aka more gene loss and gain. This makes sense because the researchers also found more gene duplications. Extra gene copies give evolution more material to play with. (This turnover signal was strongest in the baleen whales as well.)

Evolution is cleverer than we are…

- More Here

Dog Aging Project

The Dog Aging Project aims to understand how genes, lifestyle, and environment influence aging so that dogs and their humans can live longer and healthier lives.

Few months after Max passed away; Dog Aging Project started. It's one of a kind longitudinal study on  aging by tracking data of dogs their entire lifetime. 

Of course, Neo is part of the study and he is little over a year now. You can nominate your dog when the next enrollment starts. 

Daniel Promislow, the Principal Investigator of Dog Aging Project told me in an email that the entire data will be open sourced and they will do so latter this year. So anyone can help them with their skills in modeling etc., That is something I am looking forward to do. 

When This House Became A Home

Fifteen years ago, this day 05/21/2006 Max came home :-) 

What a beautiful life he bought into this house and made it a home when his little 8 weeks old steps ran inside. 

There is no words to describe; just this blog... and rest of my life is a living testimony to that moment in time. 

I love you Max. Miss you. 

Max's First Photo & First Moments When He Made This House A Home

Whale Friendship!

While the majority of the whales spent most of their time alone, some spent at least some of their time in all-male groups or pairs. The scientists’ analysis revealed that nearly 10 percent of the whales studied had one buddy that they spent at least two years in close proximity to. One pair of whale friends, known as NS-PM089 and NS-PM090, were observed together on 10 separate occasions over the course of five years (which is twice as often as I see most of my friends these days).

Although the researchers did not observe any associations that lasted longer than five years, Kobayashi says it’s possible the friendships persisted once the whales left the study area. Long-term relationships between unrelated males “are relatively rare among mammals,” says Kobayashi. The closest thing to the sperm whale’s social structure is that of the African elephant. Like sperm whales, African elephants live in matriarchal groups from which males are expelled upon reaching sexual maturity. Male African elephants usually live alone, but will sometimes form small groups with other males.

No one knows exactly why male sperm whales and African elephants sometimes choose to spend their time with others, but scientists like Kobayashi believe it might improve the animals’ ability to survive. For example, “male sperm whales may hunt more efficiently by sharing information about their prey through echolocation,” he says.

Regardless of whether male sperm whales form friendships to enhance their ability to find food or to stave off loneliness, the fact that they do is yet another example of how similar these animals are to humans says Shane Gero, a behavioral ecologist and cofounder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, who was not involved with the study. “Sperm whales spend 80 percent of their time in the dark vastness of the deep ocean—yet their lives are so surprisingly similar to ours.” Just like us, he says, sperm whales have family and friends that support them over the course of their lives.

Kobayashi hopes that his research will help scientists “reveal the evolution of social structures among mammals, including humans.” Although much remains to be learned about how and why humans and whales interact with their own kind, Kobayashi and his colleagues believe that the more we learn about the two species, the more similarities we will find.

- More here

UFO's, Animals, Self Deception, Adaptation & Sapiens ! (Wow)

Wow! What a column! it was like reading my thoughts. I often said, the one person I want to meet in the world is Robert Trivers (ironically, he lives few miles from me in NJ) who is the uncrowned father of self deception research. 

Sapiens trait of self deception is grossly underrated and in the upcoming centuries, tackling that will be one of the biggest challenges if anyone "likes" to work on changing sapiens (btw., good luck with that). 

Ezra Klein has a brilliant column on - hold your breathe, most people are NOT interested in UFO's although tons of documents have been already released by CIA last year. Along the similar lines, people already have become "immune" to our world being turned upside down since last year because of COVID. They just "go-on" with their lives and accept the "new normal" (whatever crap that means). Sapiens adapt to whatever the reality unleashes on them with a caveat - they don't change their minds and retro-fit their magical beliefs to the new knowledge. 

Ezra Klein asks us - Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out:

The way I’ve framed the thought experiment in recent conversations is this: Imagine, tomorrow, an alien craft crashed down in Oregon. There are no life-forms in it. It’s effectively a drone. But it’s undeniably extraterrestrial in origin. So we are faced with the knowledge that we’re not alone, that we are perhaps being watched, and we have no way to make contact. How does that change human culture and society?

One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? Certainly not the academics who’d laughed them off as nonsense, or the governments who would now be seen as liars.

“I’ve always resisted the conspiracy narrative around U.F.O.s,” Alexander Wendt, a professor of international security at Ohio State University who has written about U.F.O.s, told me. “I assume the governments have no clue what any of this is and they’re covering up their ignorance, if anything. That’s why you have all the secrecy, but people may think they were being lied to all along.”

The question, then, would be who could impose meaning on such an event. “Instead of a land grab, it would be a narrative grab,” Diana Pasulka, author of “American Cosmic: U.F.O.s, Religion, Technology,” told me. There would be enormous power — and money — in shaping the story humanity told itself. If we were to believe that the contact was threatening, military budgets would swell all over the world. A more pacific interpretation might orient humanity toward space travel or at least interstellar communication. Pasulka says she believes this narrative grab is happening even now, with the military establishment positioning itself as the arbiter of information over any U.F.O. events.

One lesson of the pandemic is that humanity’s desire for normalcy is an underrated force, and there is no single mistake as common to political analysis as the constant belief that this or that event will finally change everything. If so many can deny or downplay a disease that’s killed millions, dismissing some unusual debris would be trivial. “An awful lot of people would basically shrug and it’d be in the news for three days,” Adrian Tchaikovsky, the science fiction writer, told me. “You can’t just say, ‘Still no understanding of alien thing!’ every day. An awful lot of people would be very keen on continuing with their lives and routines no matter what.”

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

[---]

Slaughter went on to make a point about the difficulty of uniting humanity that I’d been contemplating as well. “After all, we are facing the destruction of the planet as we know it and have inhabited it for millennia over a couple of decades, and that does not even unify Americans, much less people around the globe.” If the real threat of climate change hasn’t unified countries and focused our technological and political efforts behind a common purpose, why should the more uncertain threat of aliens?

And yet, I’d like to believe it could be different. Steven Dick, the former chief historian for NASA, has argued that indirect contact with aliens — a radio signal, for instance — would be more like past scientific revolutions than past civilizational collisions. The correct analogy, he suggests, would be the realization that we share our world with bacteria, or that the Earth orbits the sun, or that life is shaped by natural selection. These upheavals in our understanding of the universe we inhabit changed the course of human science and culture, and perhaps this would, too. “There are times in science when just knowing that a thing is possible motivates an effort to get there,” Jacob Foster, a sociologist at U.C.L.A., told me. The knowledge that there were other space-faring societies might make us more desperate to join them or communicate with them.

There’s a school of thought that says interplanetary ambitions are ridiculous when we have so many terrestrial crises. I disagree. I believe our unsolved problems reflect a lack of unifying goals more than a surfeit of them. America made it to the moon in the same decade it created Medicare and Medicaid and passed the Civil Rights Act, and I don’t believe that to be coincidence.

A more cohesive understanding of ourselves as a species, and our planet as one ecosystem among others, might lead us to take more care with what we already have, and the sentient life we already know. The loveliest sentiment I came across while doing this (admittedly odd) reporting was from Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. “You also asked how we should react,” she said over email. “I guess my preferred reaction would be for the knowledge that someone was watching to inspire us to be the best examples of intelligent life that we could be.”

I recognize this is a treacly place to end up: evidence of extraterrestrial life, or even surveillance, reminding us of what we should already know. But that doesn’t make it less true. Callard’s words brought to mind one of my favorite science fiction stories, “The Great Silence,” by the writer Ted Chiang (whom I interviewed here, in a conversation that explores this fable). In it, he imagines a parrot talking to the humans managing the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, for more than 50 years the largest single dish radio telescope on earth. There we are, creating technological marvels to find life in the stars, while we heedlessly drive wild parrots, among so many others species, toward extinction here at home.

“We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them,” the parrot muses. “Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?”

The Joy Of A Kitten’s Caress On My Feet…

The joy of a kitten’s caress on my feet…

Is a life enough for me.

Those beautiful lines are from the song Life Of Ram from a beautiful Tamil movie named 96.

I never knew an actor like Vijay Sethupathi existed. I am so glad I started watching his movies this year, over a decade after he started acting. I salute and bow to your humility and acting skills. You make art of cinema lovable and alive. Thank you, sir. 

To state the obvious, Fluffy and Garph make each moment of my life so rich that the joy of just being with them is enough for me in this life. Max already gave me everything I wanted in life; I have written many times since he passed away - my desires in this life ended on October 4th 2019 when Max came back home surviving the worst phase of his and my life. I cannot ask for more from this life. 

All songs from this movie are mesmerizing with Govind Vasantha melancholic violin pieces.  

What I've Been Reading

Unicellular genes that enhance competition and survival are precisely those genes that cause cancer in multicellular organisms. The seed of cancer already exists in every multicellular organism, because it is simply a remnant of our evolutionary past. When the new rule break down, the old unicellular behaviors reassert themselves. The seed of cancer grows, is immortal, moves around, and uses the Warburg effect. This is an ancient tool kit of survival responses. These are the hallmarks of cancer. This is the new invasive species known as cancer. 

The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Dr. Jason Fung.

Dr. Jason's book was published few months after Max passed away but until I read this book, I have no idea that cancer is a unicellular organism that was competing with Max and every one of us who are multicellular organisms. This changes everything I knew about cancer and the treatment options. To be clear, none of the treatments given to Max nor available now are nothing but playing Russian roulette with not only genetics, lifestyle, ecology but against a primordial unicellular organism which is evolved before we did. 

What is Cancer?

The term cancer does not refer to a single disease, but denotes a collection of many different diseases related to certain qualities. Something can be considered cancer when it has the following 8 characteristics:

• Grows
• It sustains proliferative signaling
• It evades growth suppressors
• It resists cell death
• It induces angiogenesis.
• Is Immortal
• It enables replicative immortality
• Moves Around
• It activates invasion and metastasis
• It evades immune destruction
• Uses the Warburg Effect
• It deregulates cellular energetics

Benign cancer shares all the first five characteristics and without the ability to metastasize, cancer is more a nuisance than a serious health concern. 

Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT)

The basic postulates of SMT include: 

1. Cancer is caused by acquiring multiple DNA mutations.
2. These mutations accumulate randomly.
3. The cells in the tumor are all derived from one original clone. 

The somatic mutation theory of carcinogenesis patched together all the disparate know causes of cancer into a coherent, unified theory (mine: very similar to a religious, free-market, or soviet style ideologies).  This paradigm focused research from extrinsic agents (chemicals, radiations, and viruses) onto intrinsic defects (genetic mutations). 

The great contemporary thinker and philosopher Nassim Taleb often uses this allegory of the Procrustean bed to describe how facts are often tortured to fit a certain narrative. The widely and often blindly followed somatic mutation theory of cancer required a Procrustean bed to fit the facts, too. 

Cancer was far, far more different genetically than they were alike since:

• Different types of cancer had different mutations 
• The same type of cancer in different patients had different mutations. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in the primary tumor compared to metastatic cancer. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in different mutations at different sites of metastasis. 
• The same cancer in the same patients in the same tumor mass had different mutations. 

Cancer was a baffling mishmash of genetic peculiarities that had almost no connection to one another. Genetic mutations were everywhere and nowhere. Some cancers had hundreds of mutations, and others had none at all. The rate of mutations necessary to develop a cancer is much higher than the known rate of mutation in human cells. Normal cells just don't mutate anywhere close to the rate needed to produce cancer. Finally, the genetic mutations were a proximate, rather than a root, cause of cancer. 

Genetic mutations may explain the mechanism of how cancers keep growing, but they do not explain the fundamental question of why these genes mutated. The SMT fails because it is entirely inward-looking, towards our genes, instead of outward-looking, toward the environment. The seed is important, but the soil matters most. 

Cancer is older than humanity

The oncogenes and the tumor suppressor genes discovered so laboriously over the last quarter-century are mutations of normal genes. Every single cell in our body contains the seed of cancer. Why?

Dogs get cancer. Cats get cancer. Rats get cancer. Even the most primitive multicellular organisms develop cancer. In 2014, cancer was discovered in two species of hydra. You may recall from high school biology class that hydra are simple, small aquatic organisms that evolved very early on from single-cell organisms. 

The origins of cancer are found at the origins of all multicellular life itself. This may have seemed obvious to a cancer outsider, but not to an insider with the curse of knowledge. Cancer is very deeply embedded into the way multicellular life is done. 

Cancer is older than humanity. Searching for the answers to cancer's origin among the evolutionarily recent genes of humans is futile. The answers are simply not there. Cancer was something much older and more fundamental to life on earth than humanity. 

Single-cell organisms differ from multicellular organisms by the following four main characteristics: 

1. They grow
2. They are immortal
3. They move around
4. They use glycolysis (also called the Warburg effect)

These are precisely the characteristics of cancer!

Cancer originates from cells of a multicellular organism, but it behaves precisely as a single-cell organism. This is a spectacular and novel finding. 

The roots of cancer lie in our evolutionary past. Perhaps cancer was not a forward-looking evolutionary process, but a backward-looking one. 

Today's standard cancer treatments resemble ancient existential threats: radiation (pre-ozone layer), poison, and antimetabolites (nutritional challenges, periodic starvation). Unicellular cells are no strangers to these threats and have evolved effective responses to flourish under these precise conditions. 

We've long treated cancer as some kind of random genetic mistake. A mistake that arises in all animals throughout history and evolves independently in millions of people a year? Cancer is hardly a mistake. Cancer is the ultimate survivor. When all else dies, cancer is there because it is the core of the cell that will survive at all costs. Cancer is not random, and it is not stupid. It has developed the tools it needs to survive. 

This model fits the known facts of cancer better than any previous paradigm. Undoubtedly, this will not be the final word on cancer, and it should not be judged as such. Nor are all its suppositions proven facts. There will always be much to learn about cancer, but I believe this new paradigm is a huge and useful step forward, explaining many of cancer's mysteries. 

Nutrition & Cancer: 

Fiber - By comparative study between African (with lots of fiber) and Western diet (little fiber); cancer was not simply a disease of too little fiber, and thus, eating more fiber didn't translate into less cancer. 

Fat - By comparative study between South Pacific Islanders (with lots of fat) and Indian vegetarians (low fat); lowering dietary fat resulted in no measurable protection against cancer. 

Vitamins - When vital nutrients like beta-carotene are available in large doses, cancer cells are highly active and grow like weeds. Same with folic acid (vitamin B9), Vitamin E while Vitamin C, D, and Omega-3 oils were neutral. High-dose vitamins promote cell growth. It is really that simple. 

But diet plays a large role in cancer. 

• Obesity clearly increases the risk of cancer. Obesity also clearly increases the risk of type 2 diabetics. The link - insulin. 
• Avoid - Sugar and refined grains which leads to hyperinsulinemia. 
• Insulin is an important nutrient sensor, signaling the presence of food, but what does that have to do with cancer? Everything! The nutrient sensor insulin is also a highly potent growth factor. 
• Each increase in ten centimeters in height is associated with a 16 percent increase in the risk of cancer. Growth factors increase height. Growth factors also increase cancer risk. 
• The most widely studied natural food for cancer chemoprevention (term used to denote foods, supplements, or drugs that may block progression of cancer) is green tea, which contains high levels of catechins. 

Growth - The common thread that runs through all conditions of increased weight, increased weight, increased eyeball length (myopia), and cancer is that they are all conditions of excessive growth. We often think growth is good, but the truth is that in adults, growth is not necessary or even good. Quite the contrary, growth is bad, sometimes very bad. 

Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) - This was an astonishing revelation for biologists - the equivalent of discovering a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Hundreds of years of medical science had somehow missed this fundamental nutrient-sensing pathway that was so essential to life on earth that it had been conserved in animals from yeast all the way to humans. In an evolutionary sense, mTOR is older even than the much better-known sensor insulin. The mTOR pathway is found in virtually all life-forms, rather than just mammals, so the name was changed to a mechanistic target of rapamycin, but it retained its catchy moniker "mTOR". 

AMPK - The nutrient sensors insulin and mTOR respond mainly to dietary intake of carbohydrates and proteins. The nutrient sensor AMPK, however, assesses the overall available cellular energy. 

• Lots of energy stored = low AMPK
• LIttle energy stored = high AMPK
• High AMPK lowers mTOR activity, slowing growth down. AMPK increases the production of new mitochondria, the energy makers in cells, to increase the cell's capacity for burning fat. AMPK also increases autophagy, the important cellular self-cleansing, and the recycling process. 
• Foods and drugs that activate AMPK - Diabetes drug metformin; resveratrol from grapes and red wine; epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) from green tea and chocolate; capsaicin from peppers; turmeric, garlic, and the traditional Chinese medical herb berberine. Calorie restriction also activates AMPK. 

Autophagy - The word autophagy derives from the Greek word auto, meaning "self" and phagein, meaning "to eat", so it literally means "eating oneself". Autophagy is a regulated, orderly process of degrading cellular components to be recycled into new ones. Autophagy functions as a cellular housekeeper, when mTOR is high, putting the cell into growth mode, so autophagy and mitophagy (the process of removing old and damaged mitochondria) turn off. 

• Nutrient deprivation, especially protein deprivation lowers mTOR and activates autophagy. 

Metastasis:

Cancer cells break off the primary tumor to find more room to grow. This happens early in cancer's course, as the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) consume nutrients rapidly and are very quickly driven by the increased competition for resources. This new environmental stress creates new evolutionary selection pressures. 

Unfortunately, these CTCs find out that the bloodstream is a terribly hostile environment, and most just die. One day, a rare genetic mutant arises that is able to survive both the immune cell attack and the travel through the bloodstream long enough to circulate back to the original tumor site. 

As it returns home, it finds a sanctuary against all the scary things trying to kill it, and it recovers. The tumor has just self-seeded. But this returning cancer is more aggressive and just a tiny bit better able to survive in the bloodstream. This more aggressive variant multiplies within the safety of the primary tumor site. It dominates and outcompetes the incumbent cancer cells. This cycle of tumor self-seeding and metastasis repeats over and over, with cancer continually evolving over time its ability to survive the bloodstream. 

Eventually, a rare genetic mutation allows the cancer cells to reach the new distant shore of the other organs and manage to survive. They might not thrive, but at least they're not dead. This micrometastasis is so small that it is undetectable and may lie dormant for decades. Invasion and metastasis are difficult to skills to master, and most cancers fail. 

Given enough time, Darwinian evolutionary processes select a rare genetic variant to flourish, and the little outpost of metastatic cancer cells grows. Cancer has just become metastatic. This slow process from initial carcinogenesis to metastasis takes decades. 

New Dawn:

The evolutionary/ecologic paradigm recognizes the importance of cell-to-cell interactions and interactions with the environment, making it a far more dynamic, inclusive, and comprehensive theory of cancer. Evolutionary biology links carcinogenesis, progression, and metastasis, whereas genetics considers them all as separate issues. 

This idea is not new; it just needed to be rediscovered. "Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars," wrote cancer researcher D.W. Smithers in 1962. A traffic jam results from the interaction between the car, neighboring cars, and the environment. If you look only at each individual car - Are the brakes working? Was it recently serviced? - you will fail to find the problem. 

Similarly, cancer is not only a genetic disease but also an ecological disease. The environment plays a huge role in determining whether cancer grows. Under certain conditions, such as high insulin levels, cancer will thrive, while under other conditions, it will fail to establish itself. 

Treatments:

Screening

Simply catching more early-stage diseases is not useful by itself. In breast and colorectal cancer, screening reduced late-stage disease but in prostate, esophageal, and pancreatic cancer it has not, and that makes all the difference in the world. 

Many of the early-stage breast cancers are unlikely to ever progress to a dangerous state - as the evolutionary model explains, cancer can be fully contained by the body's own anti-cancer mechanisms. Aggressive treatment of early cancers is simply unnecessary. With toxic treatments such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the treatment may be worse than the disease. 

Finding and treating cancers that don't need to be treated is not a useful strategy. 

Without good evidence of the benefits of screening, and a better understanding of why it may fail, we must rely on the ancient medical guiding principle of Primum non-nocere, which means, "First, do no harm." 

Dietary Determinants

Autopsy studies find unsuspected prostate cancer in 30 percent of men over the age of fifty, 50 percent by age seventy, and an astounding 80 percent by age ninety. Because the seed of cancer is ever-present in all our cells, an important question is: why don't you get cancer? If it is not a seed problem, then it may be a soil problem. Diet is a hugely important determinant of progression because nutrient availability is inextricably linked to cell growth, particularly for cancer cells. For the most part, dietary prevention of cancer boils down to one key strategy: avoiding diseases of hyperinsulinemia, including obesity and type-2 diabetes.   

Ketones

When fat is metabolized for energy, molecules called ketone bodies are produced, which cancer cells have difficulty using. By simulating the breakdown of muscle protein, amino acids are delivered to the liver and converted to glucose, which cancer cells love. So, while weight loss may be a useful strategy to prevent the progression of cancer, cancer cachexia (a phenomenon of unintentional weight loss in patients with advanced disease), once advanced, limits the effect of diet on cancer treatment. Reducing glucose in an attempt to "starve" cancer is only modestly hopeful because advanced cancer can break down other tissues to free the glucose it needs. Dietary therapy must likely be combined with other treatments to be effective at this stage.

Fasting & Cancer:

• Intermittent fasting is a promising nutritional approach for cancer prevention, as it protects against many risk factors such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and inflammation. 
• Fasting simultaneously reduces all human nutrient sensors, most of the growth pathways, and also increases autophagy and mitoghagy. 
• Fasting during chemotherapy may also reduce the side effects of treatment while increasing efficacy. Fasting protects the normal cells by putting them into a quiescent state, or maintenance mode, which may help mitigate chemotherapy side effects of hair loss and nausea. Cancer cells do not enjoy this protective state because their genetic programming puts them into continuous growth mode. 

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has several inherent advantages over conventional treatments. 

• The boosted immune system is a dynamic system that can better keep pace with cancer's moves. The immune system can adjust and evolve alongside the cancer. 
• Immune system has a memory, so it may prevent recurrence. 
• Immunotherapy has fewer side effects than standard chemotherapies because the immune system is a targeted treatment. 
• Immunotherapy is a systemic treatment, which is crucial because cancer is a systemic disease. Metastasis occurs early in the disease process, so a systemic therapy can treat potential micrometastases throughout the body. The immune system can lock on and destroy cancer cells and does not need to be manually targeted in the same way as local treatments like surgery and radiation. The systemic nature of treatment also means that immunotherapy may be effective even very late in the disease process, after the cancer has metastasized. 

Condorcet's Jury Theorem

Condorcet's jury theorem is a political science theorem about the relative probability of a given group of individuals arriving at a correct decision. The theorem was first expressed by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1785 work Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions.

The assumptions of the simplest version of the theorem are that a group wishes to reach a decision by majority vote. One of the two outcomes of the vote is correct, and each voter has an independent probability p of voting for the correct decision. The theorem asks how many voters we should include in the group. The result depends on whether p is greater than or less than 1/2:

• If p is greater than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote correctly), then adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. In the limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases.
• On the other hand, if p is less than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote incorrectly), then adding more voters makes things worse: the optimal jury consists of a single voter.

- That's from Wikipedia

In other words, the wisdom of crowds depends on each individual sapiens' "enhanced" wisdom. If most people are knowledgeable, then the crowd's wisdom works, but if most people are leading just a "busy" self-centered life or worse biased view of the world, then the wisdom of the crowd goes down the drain. 

This has huge consequences on democracy, the free market, and yeah, civilization as we know. 

I rest my case.  It's amazing how we made it this far. 

Misguided Moral Enthusiasm + Selective Knowledge = Unleashing Evil + Terror

Karl Popper's 1942 book,  Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge has "few"  timely insights for myself and for the rest of my fellow sapiens who like to nurture Adam Smith's famous impartial spectator inside them. 

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.

[---]

The main troubles of our time--and I do not deny that we live in troubled times--are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.

[---]

And it implies that if we respect truth, we must search for it by persistently searching for our errors: by indefatigable rational criticism, and self-criticism.

[---]

The method of learning by trial and error—of learning from our mistakes—seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.

[---]

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment.

          [---] 

The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their 'clinical observations'. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.

On The Importance Of Sadness

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

- George Orwell, 1984

Evolution has given us numerous emotions in our emotional toolkit so that we surface the right ones as and when needed in our life's journey. We must learn to ignore most of what society preaches since society is designed to overfit on mindless happiness. Let's embrace what nature has given us. 

This is not just abstract philosophy but using correct emotions at the right times helps us change our mind and body to become a better living being. In this case, poet Rainer explains how sadness works its magic:

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? … Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

[…]

Almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, — is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.

[---]

We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside

[---]

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened … if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet (via brainpickings)

Should I Consider A Second Dog?

Daniel Lavery makes a compelling case!

In case of second dog, one resigns as coach-minder-supervisor-sole-proprietor and enters into a franchisee agreement with the first dog. Second dog raises interesting possibilities on the subjects of dominionism, animality, non-human interests, duty-towards-self, duty-towards-unself, duty-towards-other-selves, domesticity, structure, order of precedence, and where should second dog sleep (on the bed, with the first dog, and with you, over a special blanket, so your blanket remains cleaner). Sleep in a big bed with your dogs, near a roaring fire tended high by the servants of your body and your fiefdom, and see to it that the rushes in the feasting-hall are replaced daily with fresh hay.

It is not good that a dog should be alone. To solve the problem of dog, one must consider second dog. With second dog, there is a possibility of direct dog-to-dog relation, without human mediation; alien delights await. Two dogs can make a decision in concert, confer in committee, register robust disapproval, deliver admonishments, incite and invite gamesomeness, and develop new types of language, all while you, the proprietor of two dogs, need think of nothing, become a dog owner emeritus, allowing your deputy manager to interpret and maintain your interests on the trading floor. Also, you will have two dogs to look at, with your two eyes. You can look at them both. There are two dogs to look at now. Objects which could once be only investigated, gnawed, and discarded are now ripe for conflict, pressing, pulling, entautening, contest, evasion. Notice your dog notice your dog. Endless recursions of looking, with introduction of second dog, dog-as-mirror and dog-as-mirrored. Dog, seconded.

 

Playing Frisbee Rough!

Neo is getting good at playing frisbee but he is rough; talk about elegance!