Bad news for cancer cure

It is fundamentally impossible to find a final cancer cure, says Norwegian researcher Jarle Breivik.
The reason is based on the idea of the selfish gene and Darwinian evolution. As Dawkins and others have observed, our bodies are just vehicles for the genes to propagate themselves. Evolution is not survival of the fittest of the organisms, but of the genes. After parents have produced children, and they can take care of themselves, the parents are irrelevant and dispensable, form the genes point of view.

The link to cancer is the recognition that cancer is not caused by sunshine, smoke, junk food and other carcinogens - they are only stimulants for producing variants - cancer is basically a genetic disease. It has to do with mistakes in copying and reproducing DNA and the repair mechanism. As we age, evolution will favor cells which break free and behave in in-orderly manners, in other words, cancer cells.

“The better we get at treating cancer, the older we become and the more cancer there will be in the population. Additionally, better therapy for children and young people implies that more cancer genes are passed on to the next generation. From what we know about evolutionary dynamics, I believe it’s impossible to find a therapeutic solution to cancer. The basic problem is that we are trapped in a body that the genes have made to be disposable. A solution will therefore be something much more radical than a new drug,” says Breivik in "No Solution to Cancer."

To illustrate the process, Breivik uses a Grand Prix model (see illustration in the same article, or "Don't stop for repairs in a war zone: Darwinian evolution unites genes and environment in cancer development" ), where there two cars, one green and one red. The green cars always stop at the pitstop whenever some trouble develops, the red car never stops. In a harsh environment, the red car has better probability chances of reaching finish.

At the end of the article, Breivik says that we should rather care for our minds than bodies. In the future, our bodies will be cyborgs.

“It's the mind, our thoughts and consciousness that we desperately want to preserve. If we look at technological developments as a whole, that may be exactly what’s happening. The ongoing revolution in information and biotechnology may be interpreted as the mind’s liberation from the genes. It’s difficult to imagine the alternative, but if I could see a thousand years into the future, I would be very surprised if earth is still dominated by two-legged creatures with a limited life span.”

This is interesting to read in connection with the parallel evolution of the memes, the basis of cultural evolution.