couple selection pressure to the internal structure of renormalization in a
‘natural’ iterated punctuation. In short, we model a mutator in its most
general nature.
We next speculate that internal cellular mechanisms controlling cancers
may be actively cognitive. This cognitive internal process may itself become
linked with the structured system of external selection pressures affecting
the mutator. The resulting synergism affects tumorigenesis by means of a
punctuated interpenetration between a process of ‘socio-cellular’ cognition
and adaptive clonal responses. Culturally crafted, systematic patterns of
psychosocial stress are seen as literally writing an image of themselves onto
tumorigenesis in a highly plieotropic manner, involving far more than just
chronic inflammation. In this we are implicitly critical of currently popular
biomedical ‘inflammation’ models of tumorigenesis which seem reflexively re-
ductionist and distinctly unwilling to confront the full complexities of human
biology (e.g. [13]).
Under this revised paradigm, cancer becomes a complicated disease of hu-
man ecology, likely to respond at the population level only to multifactorial,
multiscale strategies which include redressing patterns of past and continuing
social and economic injustice.
Review of formalism
Before beginning the formal treatment, we highlight several important
points:
First, information theory is notorious for providing ‘existence theorems’
whose application is arduous indeed. For example, while the Shannon Coding
Theorem implied the possibility of very efficient coding schemes as early as
1949, it took more than forty years for practical ‘turbo codes’ to be created.
Our adaptation of the Shannon Source Coding Theorem is unlikely to be less
difficult.
Second, we are invoking information theory variants of the fundamental
asymptotic limit theorems of probability. These are independent of exact
mechanism, but constrain the collective behavior of such mechanisms. For
example, although not all processes involve long sums of individual stochastic
variables, those that do, regardless of the individual variable distributions,
follow a Normal distribution as a consequence of the Central Limit The-
orem. Similarly, the games of chance in a Las Vegas casino are all quite
different, but nonetheless the possible success of ‘strategies’ for playing them