humans, this suggests a critical role for the ‘signal’ of psychosocial stress, as
mediated by a local ‘sociocultural network’, i.e. an embedding cognitive
social structure linked to a cultural practice and history.
Contemporary evolutionary anthropology (e.g. [18]) emphasizes that cul-
ture, largely defining what social relations are particularly helpful or stressful,
has become inextricably intertwined with human biology. Recent analysis
(e.g. [21]) suggests that psychosocial stress is a very strong signal indeed
and severally affects the stages of mutation control: immune surveillance,
both DNA damage and repair, apoptosis, and rates of somatic mutation -
the ‘mutator phenotype’ we will explore at length below.
Atlan and Cohen [3] and Cohen [12] go even further, finding the immune
system is itself cognitive. The immune system compares incoming signals
of immune challenge with a stored picture of the world in a kind of im-
mune memory and then chooses a fairly precise response from a much larger
repertoire. We have extended this characterization [53, 56] to show how an
embedding sociocultural network, the local ‘extended family’ in which every
human finds him or herself, can interact with both an individual’s central
nervous and immune systems. We characterize this synergism as a ‘cog-
nitive condensation’ that links social to psychoneuroimmunologic function.
According to our analysis, a systematic pattern of externally-imposed stres-
sors constitutes a ‘language’ that can interact with this condensation. The
‘signal’ of imposed coherent stress then literally writes a distorted image of
itself onto the cognitive condensation, and ultimately onto the functioning
of the immune system.
Here we will extend that work to look at the effect of structured external
stress on tumorigenesis. We will describe the ‘local evolution’ of cancer within
a tissue in terms of a ‘punctuated interpenetration’ between a tumorigenic
mutator mechanism and an embedding cognitive process of mutation control,
including but transcending immune function.
Punctuated biological processes are found up and down temporal scales.
Evolutionary punctuation is a modern extension of Darwinian evolutionary
theory that accounts for the relative stability of a species’ fossil record be-
tween the time it first appears and its extinction (e.g. [24]). Species appear
‘suddenly’ on a geologic timescale, persist relatively unchanged for a fairly
long time, and then disappear suddenly, again on a geologic timescale. Evo-
lutionary process is vastly speeded up in tumorigenesis, but we believe it to
be subject to a version of ‘punctuation’ that accounts for the staged nature
of the disease.