TOWARD CULTURAL ONCOLOGY: THE EVOLUTIONARY INFORMATION DYNAMICS OF CANCER

particularly for the hormonal cancers which seem to especially characterize
the contrast in power relations between groups.

Although chronic inflammation, related certainly to structured psychoso-
cial stress, is likely to be a contributor to the enhancement of pathological
mutation and the degradation of corrective response, we do not believe it to
be the only such trigger. The constant cross-talk between central nervous,
hormonal, immune, and tumor control systems guarantees that the ‘message’
of culturally constructed external stress will write itself upon the full realm
of individual physiology in a highly plieotropic manner, with multifactorial
impact on both cell clone mutation and tumor control.

This suggests in particular that, while anti-inflammants may indeed be
of benefit for individual cases, on the whole, population-level death rates
from certain classes of cancer and the related disease guild of ‘inflammatory’
chronic diseases will continue to express an image of imposed patterns of
‘pathogenic social hierarchy’ and related deprivations (e.g. [34]). In particu-
lar, anti-inflammant ‘magic bullet’ therapies will not be effective in reducing
population-level health disparities.

It is clear, however, that amelioration of ‘structured patterns of stress’
through legislation and public policy should be a priority if we are truly se-
rious in addressing those disparities. Such a program would greatly benefit
both powerful and marginalized groups, since cultural patterns of depriva-
tion, discrimination, and pathogenic social hierarchy necessarily enmesh all.

Appendix: ‘Biological’ renormalizations

Here we provide examples of ‘non-physical’ renormalization schemes which
may have relevance to biological or social phenomena. To reiterate, equation
(3) above states that the information source and the correlation length, the
degree of coherence on the underlying network, scale under renormalization
clustering in chunks of size R as, after slight rearrangement,

H[KR,JR]/f(R)=H[J,K]

χ[KR, JR]R = χ(K, J),

with f(1) = 1, K₁ = K, J₁ = J.

Differentiating these two equations with respect to R, so that the right
hand sides are zero, and solving for dKR/dR and dJR/dR gives, after some
consolidation, expressions of the form

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