TOWARD CULTURAL ONCOLOGY: THE EVOLUTIONARY INFORMATION DYNAMICS OF CANCER

control strategies which we infer must be cognitive. This set may include,
but likely transcends, Cohen’s vision of immune cognition.

An essential character of physical systems subject to phase transition is
that they belong to particular ‘universality classes’. This means that the
exponents of power laws describing behavior at phase transition will be the
same for large groups of markedly different systems, with ‘natural’ aggrega-
tions representing fundamental class properties (e.g. [9]).

It is our contention that biological or social systems undergoing phase
transition analogs need not be constrained to such classes, and that ‘uni-
versality class tuning’, meaning the strategic alteration of parameters char-
acterizing the renormalization properties of evolutionary punctuation, might
well be possible, especially in response to selection pressure or other stressors.
Here we focus on the tuning of parameters within a single, given, renormaliza-
tion relation. Clearly, however, wholesale shifts of renormalization properties
in response to adaptation pressure must ultimately be considered as well.

Universality class tuning has been observed in models of ‘real world’ net-
works. As Albert and Barabasi [2] put it,

“The inseparability of the topology and dynamics of evolving
networks is shown by the fact that [the exponents defining uni-
versality class] are related by [a] scaling relation..., underlying the
fact that a network’s assembly uniquely determines its topology.
However, in no case are these exponents unique. They can be
tuned continuously...”

We extend these results to an information dynamics model of the adaptive
mutator, with particular emphasis on cancer etiology and the effects of larger
embedding cultural structures on population differences in disease incidence
and virulence.

The literature on the mutator is vast and growing (see, e.g., [35, 48]). In
sum, Thaler [48] finds “...it is conceivable that the mutagenic effects associ-
ated with a cell sensing its environment and history could be as exquisitely
regulated as transcription...”. Thus a structured environment may, in a
higher iteration which Tenaillon et al. [49] characterize as ‘second-order selec-
tion’, write itself, in a punctuated manner, onto the very internal workings of
evolutionary punctuation itself, with evident implications for understanding
tumorigenesis.

We begin with a brief review of the appropriate information dynamics
formalism, describe the ‘tuning’ of evolutionary phase transition, and finally

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