That would imply that from a biological stand point it should have had a self serving purpose. But it kills the host. So what gives? Where is the logic?
It has the same purpose as us, just that while our "world" is the Earth (or whatever planet our species will conquer before extinction), its "world" is merely the human body it inhabits.
The death of a cancer's host body is like our equivalent of our star dying, and I guess our equivalent of interplanetary colonization would be a hypothetical cancer's ability to jump between hosts.
Neither humans nor any other known life-forms can meaningfully influence stellar evolution regards either the fate or timing of the Sun's end.
Cancer can and does bring about the death of its host.
(One might argue that both humans and other life forms have the potential and/or demonstrated capability to transform their own ecosystem beyond its viability to continue to sustain and support them, with both the present anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-based global warming and the Great Oxygenation Event and subsequent Snowball Earth serving as examples.)
That said, I understand your analogy.
There are virally- and clonally-transmitted or otherwise contagious cancers:
Cancer colonies self-sustain and self-replicate, causing local success, then kill the host without escaping it, causing colony failure and do not successfully become a new species of independent pathogen. Local optimization causes disaster at a larger scale, causing the system to collapse.
Nothing intelligent is happening. Zero-foresight self-amplifying systems that will inevitably crash out will simply amplify themselves to that point, then cease. Applications to areas outside of oncology are an exercise for the reader.
Nextgrid|2 years ago
The death of a cancer's host body is like our equivalent of our star dying, and I guess our equivalent of interplanetary colonization would be a hypothetical cancer's ability to jump between hosts.
dredmorbius|2 years ago
Cancer can and does bring about the death of its host.
(One might argue that both humans and other life forms have the potential and/or demonstrated capability to transform their own ecosystem beyond its viability to continue to sustain and support them, with both the present anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-based global warming and the Great Oxygenation Event and subsequent Snowball Earth serving as examples.)
That said, I understand your analogy.
There are virally- and clonally-transmitted or otherwise contagious cancers:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer>
(These are rare and seldom found in humans.)
kistaro|2 years ago
Nothing intelligent is happening. Zero-foresight self-amplifying systems that will inevitably crash out will simply amplify themselves to that point, then cease. Applications to areas outside of oncology are an exercise for the reader.
hnlmorg|2 years ago
The thing with evolution is that it is random. So sometimes it really doesn’t make any logical sense.