Okay, you're right about deriving a relationship from their conclusions. At least mostly. There's certainly an interesting set of possibilities to be pursued wh

Okay, you're right about deriving a relationship from their conclusions. At least mostly. There's certainly an interesting set of possibilities to be pursued where the idea is concerned with evolutionary processes and thinking outside the box of seeing cancer as purely a random mutation, and the problematic questions Davies and Lineweaver pose from that standing perspective. Yes, they are speculating on a potential new direction of study based on being outside observers who specialize in physical systems and recognizing orchestrated, systemic actions. However, let's dial down the disdain slightly, can we? These aren't physicists arbitrarily and whimsically "poking their noses into fields they know absolutely nothing about and making grand pronouncements". These are physicists who have been asked to poke their noses into something they know absolutely nothing about and help existing specialists uncover potentially new avenues of research. Davies makes this very clear in his opening statements of the article. He admits he knew nothing about cancer, and started asking questions that were not typically the questions asked by standing specialists--who show a pattern of questioning and investigating cancer from that perspective of a random genetic mutation that occurs in humans, and not investigating the possibilities that might be found in questioning cancer as a feature of multi-cellular life as a whole. Davies and Lineweaver are not saying this is the fundamental theory of what cancer is. They are suggesting it as a possibility of future research and investigation and, given their work in their own fields, I strongly suspect they'll be willing to update their notions based on evidence. Who knows where we can get if more respected scientists joined cross-disciplinary programs that were aimed at collaborating on investigating and understanding various human concerns. It's not like the physicists who've joined these programs (of which Davies and Lineweaver are but two) are going to set back cancer research and treatment.