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This is essentially selection bias, it's the same thing as going to a high end gym and saying omg look at how fit everyone is. When you get cancer you encounte
by dogma1138 7y ago
This is essentially selection bias, it's the same thing as going to a high end gym and saying omg look at how fit everyone is.
When you get cancer you encounter cells that through natural selection developed to beat your immune system so they've already essentially discovered every trick in the book and when you attack them the cells that survive are those who wrote a new book to do so.
Things like tumor escape mechanisms aren't sentient they are just random things that cancer cells attempt and you only see the outcome of those that worked.
- kiba 7y agoGood thing, that cancer, in a manner of speaking, don't 'learn' and can't 'learn' from other tumors. This makes it possible to beat them.
- dogma1138 7y agoNot learning per se but cells do communicate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_signaling so some evasion techniques from one tumor or one cancer cell can propagate to others through various signaling pathways when applicable. Basically a cancer cell might start shouting "yo bro you should totally try this..." and other cells that receive the signal and capable of doing that action might just happen to try it, in fact in some case this is just how you get cancer, one cell starts yelling chug chug chug and all the other cells around it get hammered.
- kiba 7y agoI meant that cancer cannot learn from other cancers of somebody else, unless they are infectious cancers.
- dogma1138 7y agoWell it’s not really clear form your original post since multiple cancers are quite common especially those which are linked to the same signaling pathways.
- 666_howitzer 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease