Cancer as Evolution, part 3... Kevin points out that perhaps I am giving chemotherapy short shrift and not looking at the bigger picture.  I would counter that you can’t really make the latency analogy with human life because we are all born terminal.  “Mean survival time” is a squirrely measure at best because how do...

Cancer as Evolution, part 2... When I posted part 1, I didn’t realize that Scientific American would be coming out with an entire special issue devoted to cancer in the same month, including an article by Carl Zimmer entitled “Evolved for Cancer?“. I had hoped that the article would be about the somatic evolution of...

Policy Implications of the Ascetic Meme... I’d like to thank everyone that stuck with me for Part I and Part II. Now we get to the punch line, which is very simple: because of the Ascetic Meme, we cannot trust our instincts when it comes to environmental policy. ...

Cancer as Evolution... For anyone interested in learning about the complexity of cancer, I’d like to invite you to check out a forum I started a while ago (but only recently made public) called Cancer Complexity. One of the main themes (but not the only one) in Cancer Complexity is the notion that cancer is an evolutionary...