It’s never going to die. Paul Davies keeps promoting this garbage.
Behold, a script!
Cancer is a disease that is ripe for quackery. It’s complex, difficult to treat, and can be lethal, so there’s both a lot of motivation to find a “cure”, and a lot of variability that allow frauds to flourish. So, for instance, people peddle the “black salve”, a horrible caustic paste that you smear on the lumps formed by tumors, and it eats away at the tissues causing ghastly lesions, but doesn’t actually do anything specific against cancer. There’s the Miracle Mineral Solution, MMS, which is simply bleach, and people are injecting it, drinking it, giving themselves enemas with it, in the misbegotten belief that it will adjust their blood pH and make cancers go away. It doesn’t work. It does make people sicker, though. Another recent fad is Jilly Juice, which is just fermented kale in an extremely salty solution, and which is supposed to not only cure cancer, but regrow amputated limbs. Do I need to say it? It doesn’t work.
That’s just a small sample of the quack nostrums sold by frauds, and the one thing they have in common is that they target sick, desperate people. Today I’m going to talk about a different kind of cancer quack, one who doesn’t target the sick directly, but instead manipulates cancer research funding agencies to leech off their revenues.
I am speaking, of course, of the physicist Paul Davies, much beloved of the National Cancer Institute and the Templeton Foundation.
Once upon a time, about 15 years ago, the NCI put out a call for proposals from outside the usual ranks of biomedical researchers on how to approach cancer. It was an interesting idea — I am all in favour of interdisciplinary angles, they often promote novel approaches — and Paul Davies leapt in with a wild ass idea that skirted right past 150 years of research in evolutionary biology and medicine to resurrect a discredited early 19th century hypothesis. It was a terrible proposal. I have no idea how anyone at NCI could accept such a gobsmackingly stupid idea, but they did, and Davies has been dining out on it ever since, regularly pumping out ludicrous papers that ought to have been scuttled by the editors at quite good journals, and certainly shouldn’t have survived peer review. The real mystery is how Davies has bamboozled so many people who ought to have known better.
Here, in summary, is his explanation for cancer. I’ve made a video about his atavism theory of cancer before, so I’ll refer you to that.
Basically, he has adopted Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, the idea that we develop as embryos by repeating our evolutionary history in utero — we go through a fish stage, a reptile stage, an early mammal stage, etc. before reaching our modern human development at birth. It is totally wrong. It was reject in the 19th century, and genetics put the final nail in its coffin. But here are Davies own words on his theory.
A century ago the German biologist Ernst Haekel pointed out that the stages of embryo development recapitulate the evolutionary history of the animal. Human embryos, for instance, develop, then lose, gills, webbed feet and rudimentary tails, reflecting their ancient aquatic life styles. The genes responsible for these features normally get silenced at a later stage of development, but sometimes the genetic control system malfunctions and babies get born with tails and other ancestral traits. Such anomalous features are called atavisms.
Except of course, for the little problem that this theory was falsified long ago, and so isn’t a good foundation to build an explanation for anything on. That doesn’t stop Davies, though: in fact, he goes even further and claims that cancer is a reversion of modern human cells to a pre-metazoan state, that cancer cells have actually gone back in time, reactivating ancient biochemical pathways that were once part of the toolkit of single-celled protists. Cancer cells are like little pre-Cambrian amoebae or paramecia, just trying to resurrect their primeval free-living lifestyles.
It’s nonsense. Flaming gaseous vapour.
Your cells don’t contain a protistan toolkit. Every gene and pathway has been modified by evolution, and we’re not keeping spare copies of ancient unused genes awaiting a re-awakening.
His model is like suggesting that if I poke around in the engine of the Honda Fit parked in my driveway, somewhere under the electronic ignition system, I might find a carburetor waiting to pop out, ready to go, that my car is somehow preserving the old components of a ’57 Ford beneath its 21st century exterior. Even deeper than that, that there is a very hungry horse hiding in the engine block, ready to gallop out and take over if the more modern systems fail.
That’s not how industrial evolution works, and it’s also not how biological evolution works.
Davies quite literally thinks that IS how biology works, though.
The genes of cellular cooperation that evolved with multicellularity about a billion years ago are the same genes that malfunction to cause cancer. We hypothesize that cancer is an atavistic condition that occurs when genetic or epigenetic malfunction unlocks an ancient ‘toolkit’ of pre-existing adaptations, re-establishing the dominance of an earlier layer of genes that controlled loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells, similar to tumors. The existence of such a toolkit implies that the progress of the neoplasm in the host organism differs distinctively from normal Darwinian evolution.
These “layers” don’t exist! When my car malfunctions, I don’t get a horse, and when my cell cycle regulators fail, my cells don’t turn into little choanoflagellates, ready to swim away. I get cancers, which are not autonomous colonies of ancestral cell types.
Davies’ theory is so outrageously wrong, it should have been dismissed long ago. How is it that Davies and his collaborators continue to publish worthless papers year after year, and get funding? I have an explanation. That initial glance of attention from the NCI had one success: it fed his monstrous ego, which has now gone cancerous and is expanding catastrophically.
As he writes on the Edge website (yes, he still maintains an association with John Brockman in these post-Epstein days):
My personal belief is that biologists tend to be uncompromising and reductionistic because they’re still feeling somewhat insecure with their basic dogma, whereas physicists have three hundred years of secure foundation for their subject, so they can afford to be a bit more freewheeling in their speculation about these complex systems.
That’s astonishingly egotistical. It’s so extreme an example of the arrogance of physicists that you’d think it a caricature, but no, he really does believe he knows better than biologists, and that his lack of understanding of how biology works justifies his “freewheeling” overconfidence and trust in obsolete theories.
Davies has been plugging away at this dead theory for years now, regularly publishing his claims without a speck of evidence to back them up. He recently published a new book and has been on the interview circuit babbling about it, and once again, his hubris rises to the fore. So here he is lying about what contemporary cancer research is:
Yes, I think cancer researchers are a very good example of how over conservative thinking in biology has not led to a lack of progress, but the progress has been much less rapid…I think there’s been this naive view that if we just throw enough money at the problem, we’ll discover a pill that will make it just go away, and that’s never going to happen. We have to be much more subtle in our approach to treating cancer
That is astonishingly dishonest. I’ve taught cancer biology, I know cancer researchers, and never do they even suggest that there will be a pill to cure cancer. NEVER. This is so far from the mainstream view of cancer that either he has never talked to a cancer biologist, or he is willing to shamelessly lie about their views to make himself look clever.
Now why would he do this? It’s probably about money. He complains that he hasn’t been paid enough for his wild-ass guesses.
I was funded by NCI, which spends 5 billion dollars a year on cancer research, but when I look at how that’s spent, a lot of it is just spent on same old, same old mainstream research, very little on imaginative new approaches. The approach that I’m outlining in the book certainly has received some funding, but it’s a tiny fraction, so there is this deep conservatism in the cancer research community.
I would rather say that fact that this unqualified ass has been funded at all suggests the opposite, that the cancer research community is maybe a little too willing to listen to “imaginative” (a word that apparently means “evidence-free and disproven”) ideas. Any conservatism in the cancer research community is more a product of awareness that people’s lives hang in the balance, and that we should be testing ideas with evidence that they work. But then, I get the impression that Davies will accept all kinds of hare-brained stuff. Here, for instance, after decrying the idea of a pill to cure cancer, he promotes a pill.
So one of the most efficacious cancer drugs, it’s well known in the cancer community, is aspirin, but you know, it’s virtually free over the counter, and so getting clinical trials for something like aspirin is not easy. There have been some, but…
And some people say it isn’t.
Well, I believe it is.
Here’s the deal. It’s true. Aspirin has been suggested to be a drug that might reduce the incidence of some cancers, such as colorectal cancer. Note that it is not a treatment for cancer, but something that a few studies have found to reduce the frequency of some kinds of cancer, which is great. That “conservative cancer research community” has been quite willing to test it, and yes, there have been studies that have shown mixed results. For instance, the ASPREE trial had some unexpected outcomes.
Numerous studies have suggested that people who regularly take low doses of aspirin may have reduced risks of being diagnosed with or dying from cancer. But new findings from a randomized clinical trial, called ASPREE, suggest that the same may not hold true for older adults.
The study included approximately 19,000 generally healthy people who were 70 years of age or older. Those who took 100 mg of aspirin daily were no more likely than those who took a placebo to be diagnosed with cancer. They did, however, have a greater likelihood of being diagnosed with an advanced cancer and of dying from cancer, the ASPREE research team reported August 11 in JNCI.
Oopsie. It’s telling that Davies does not know about the subtle complexities of effects of aspirin on cancer, and can conclude that interview by claiming he believes it is efficacious. Belief isn’t how we settle these matters.
I began this video by saying that at least Davies goofy cancer beliefs don’t directly affect people with the disease, that he’s just milking the funding agencies. I have to amend that a little bit, There are a few quacks who have run with the Davies hypothesis and are treating cancer patients with “atavistic oncology”. I’ll refer you to a post by David Gorski that jumps on one proponent of the idea, a Dr Arguello.
…what, exactly, is Dr. Arguello’s “atavistic oncology”? It’s a post I’ve been meaning to do for probably years now; so now is as good a time as any. It’s also because the hypothesis that cancer represents an “atavism,” the reawakening of ancient genetic programs seen in our single-celled ancestors billions of years ago, pops up periodically and sounds plausible. Unfortunately, virtually every example of this hypothesis is riddled with misunderstandings of evolutionary biology that render the hypothesis at best highly implausible.
David is so much more polite than I am. It’s worse than highly implausible, it’s been falsified. But this guy is so convinced of Davies’ idea that cancer is a reversion to ancient cells prior to the evolution of multicellular animals that he is treating cancer patients with antibiotics and antivirals, which makes no sense at all.
OK, enough. I’ll stop there and let the kindly appreciation of these sweet people on Patreon soothe my outraged soul. I’ll also remind you all that I’m also starting a new YouTube series called Evo-Devo Diary this week, and I can pretty much guarantee that Haeckel will get a mention when I review the history of the discipline. I won’t be touting his science as foundational, though, but rather as an unfortunate mistake that sidetracked evolution and development down a dead end for a few decades, But at least Haeckel’s memory lives on in the minds of some cancer quacks! I’m sure he would be dismayed.
So, yeah, click the ol’ like and subscribe buttons, and also that little notification bell. I’m not sure exactly when that video will be out, but I’m aiming for mid-week. Don’t miss it!
Low dose aspirin didn’t prevent my cancer.
My initial treatment was as part of a trial – cancer trials are being conducted all the time in Australia.
My cancer is a result of mutation in the lymphocytes. They haven’t reverted to an ancestral form, they just grow and divide fast. Everyone has slightly different lymphoma because the DNA is your own. Part of the new treatments involves specifically targeting individual genetics – how would this work if the cells were atavistic?
I wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone, but getting cancer might be the only way to get Davies to understand how mad-brained his idea is, and how insulting it is to Oncologists and Oncology nurses who are quite wonderful people constantly looking for improved ways (based on double-blind trials) to improve treatments.
I think Piers Anthony used something like this as a plot device in his early science fiction novel Macroscope. I keep wanted to reread that sometime but I can’t find a copy. I found it very entertaining and provocative, but it had a lot of very silly ideas. I would not base a cancer treatment on it.
I have a hypothesis. It is that quackery represents an “atavism”, the reawakening of ancient psychological programs seen in our simple-minded ancestors [checks calendar] yesterday, and last month, and last year, and …
the atavism that is being reanimated if it ever really died is magic. As you might have noticed time moves only forward nothing is repeating nothing is coming back from the past. What is it that we are so easily attracted to believing that the past will return or can return. (maga0
just because we can think it up and form a “beautiful image” reality does not have to conform to it. We can abstract out of reality some small part to help us understand something but that part is not the whole it is just a useful tool no more.
uncle frogy
PZ, what is your opinion on the proposal by Henry Heng that cancer evolves by a process similar to punctuated equilibrium via what he calls ‘genome chaos’, involving multiple chromosomal changes? That mutations of individual proto-oncogenes is a late phenomenon in cancer, unrelated to its emergence?
See https://www.genetics.wayne.edu/heng/lab/research.html
Anyway, I am not a biologist or MD, but I took a short course on cancer, and the “Hallmarks of Cancer” framework is very clear. There are many controls on the growth of cells in multicellular organism. When enough of them break, the growth becomes uncontrolled. There’s more to it, but I think that is a rough summary.
It’s not an “ancestral cell”, just a cell from your own tissue that is broken in a significant way (usually multiple ways) but maintaining its ability to divide and even up-regulate the growth of blood vessels to supply it with nutrients in some cases (which I’ll add is not something you’d expect a protist to do). I can’t even imagine why anyone would think it had some ability to regress in some spooky way. Perhaps that is a reasonable hypothesis if you don’t understand DNA and mutations, but given what we know and even the ability to sequence cancer cells, it makes no sense at all. To continue with PZ’s analogy, if I make typos, my writing will not look like the language of Beowulf. It’s just modern English with typos. Or, if I am modifying a computer program and accidentally break a loop condition so it cannot terminate (a little closer to the idea of uncontrolled growth) it is not a regression to an “earlier form” of that code.
A physicist worked on my car, which then malfunctioned and split into two bicycles.
I could see the potential for anitretroviral drugs having the potential to help in cancers involving specific mutations of ancient ERV sequences, but that’d be beyond unlikely to even politely consider that notion. As likely as HCQ working against a virus.
I do wonder, did this chap work with Teller? Both seem to made good salesmen for lousy ideas that can’t work.
Anyone who thinks or speaks of cancer as a single disease rather than a number of different diseases that share certain features is already running off the rails.
Cancer is a category of diseases, not one monolithic entity.
Paul Davies has been regarded as a crank by –physicists– since at LEAST the 1990s. He’s a big proponent of the idea that Quantum Mechanical entanglement is an explanation for free will and consciousness, since at least back then, something that no serious physicist in the field endorses since at least back then, he inserted himself into the Arsenic bacterium fiasco a few years back. He did some kinda interesting work on curved spacetime in the 1970s, but has gone totally off the rails since then. He won the Templeton prize, which is usually a decent proxy for crankery. He’s been doing nothing but writing… semi questionable… non-fiction works since I was born in the 1980s. He’s a parody of the worst kind of physicist; the kind giving lectures about how QM explains free will and consciousness and god, while the rest of us sit at lab tables, groaning and saying THAT’S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS. So the fact that he’s pig-ignorant of the most basic facts about Cancer Biology and Genetics isn’t really shocking.
Solid tumours do stuff like recruit support cells, promote blood vessel growth into them, suppress host immunity, remodel basement membrane, and some even segregate themselves in germ/stem cells and somatic non-dividing cells. Those… don’t sound like anything a free living protist is likely to know how to do…
My favorite popular book on cancer is The Emperor of All Maladies. In fact, I read it when faced with cancer in my own family, which is probably why it had so much impact. In addition to explaining the nature of cancer, it also presents a compelling biography of Sidney Farber and other innovators who pushed for chemotherapy to treat childhood cancer. It’s an amazing shift away from the view that we are completely helpless and towards the present situation in which there are many treatable cancers, and it’s not necessarily a death sentence, particularly for children. But the answer isn’t magic or wishful thinking. The treatments are horrifying and something that only a monster would subject another person to except to save their life. One day, I hope we will have better, targeted treatments, though it is not obvious that we will. It is just very hard to differentiate between a cancerous cell and a normal cell from the same person.
As for whether it is a “single disease”, obviously it’s not. It’s a broad category like infectious disease. What I find more fascinating is that an individual’s cancer could be a de novo illness. There’s no saying the specific set of mutations involved have ever occurred in anyone else. It’s not like an infectious disease with an agent that must have infected others before. Of course, some mutations are similar, and the types of cancers tend to cluster, so luckily many different cancers can be handled with the same protocol.
What I find most disturbing are those who promote the idea that cancer just shouldn’t happen at all if you have a healthy life and nutrition. It’s true that you can change the odds by a lot (e.g. by smoking) but there is no way to rule out the possibility of a mutation occurring no matter what you do. I find it exasperating when people are incapable of viewing life in terms of risk.
@12 Quite right Paul. And a similarly annoying thing to me is the idea that you “battle with cancer”.
@13
“And a similarly annoying thing to me is the idea that you “battle with cancer”.
But some people do (by virtue of deciding to go for aggressive treatments versus not doing so). I don’t understand what annoys you about that.
Seconding PaulBC.
The Emperor of all Maladies is on my recommended reading list which means that if you buy it and don’t find it worthwhile, I’ll refund your purchase. Nuts, right? In all the years I have extended that offer nobody has asked for a refund.
The audiobook is also beautifully narrated.
chris61@14 I think anyone with a serious illness is entitled to whatever metaphor they like best. Actually, chemotherapy strikes me an awful lot like a carpet bombing campaign at least I understand it. First, bomb everything. Next, bomb a second time. Any signs of activity on the ground? No? Good, then bomb a third time just to be sure. And we’ll keep up surveillance for any secure bunkers that may be down there.
So it seemed like a useful metaphor to me when I saw my own family member going through this. However, it depends on the type of battle. If it’s a “mind over matter” battle of will then I agree with @13 that it’s pretty useless. I would add though, that it if helps someone maintain the will to live through very trying times, I’d be the last to criticize.
@14 The corollary is that people “lose their battle” as if they could have won if only they had fought harder, been stronger. In my experience you don’t “fight”, how can you? What you do is accept treatment. and advice from experts. And choosing “more aggressive treatments” isn’t “battling” it is just accepting further advice.
nomdeplume:
Well, it’s often misapplied.
But if one is diligent about acquiescing to (and thus following) best medical advice, it’s more than nothing. Doing it even when it’s unpleasant, well, for me that qualifies.
It is unfortunate that the impulse to “fight” can be hijacked by woo.
nomdeplume @17:
Bullshit. Battles are full of uncertainties, and sometimes just blind luck, or blind misfortune. You can be strong as you like and fight hard as fuck and still lose.
‘battling’ is an attitude, a state of mind. If, in your own personal experience, it doesn’t apply, that’s fine. But I’ve been very close to people who had cancer (in one losing case, as a 24/7 caregiver), and they certainly described it as, and acted as if it were, a battle (actually more like a war), with allies, a hated enemy, and shifting fortunes.
Tomorrow, I’ll ask one of them what she thinks of your annoyance at the term. I can guess her response.
Last time I taught cancer bio, Emperor of All Maladies was required reading for my students.
Yeah John, your third paragraph is exactly right, but that isn’t “battling”. And yes, woo is a danger, as is advice from well-meaning friends – “have you tried…”.
@19 Yes Rob, your second paragraph sums it up. “State of mind” is a determination to follow advice, look after yourself as best you can, and hang on grimly through all the unpleasantness (one more month, one more week, 3 more treatments, two more treatments…). That isn’t “battling”.
nomdeplume @22: You can, of course, come up with your own idiosyncratic definitions for any word you like, or disapprove of long-established definitions and usage.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/battle
It’s not as if it requires anything as serious cancer to invoke a “battling” metaphor. I might say I’m “battling” the Scala compiler if I’m confused about some bit of language esoterica.
nomdeplume had, I think, a point, whether or not it was phrased well. As a cancer patient, there is really not much you can do beyond accepting treatment. It still takes fortitude to endure it, but there is relatively little sense in which personal effort matters. Chemotherapy can leave you nearly helpless, e.g. suffering from mucositis and requiring TPN just to keep from starving. There’s a battle involved, but your role is less soldier than disputed territory.
Meh, I stopped reading Davies more than three decades ago for far less than this. I see he has not aged well.
Another name that I avoid is Michiu Kaku. I am unaware of any pseudoscience that he personally consciously advocates for. But he seems to be such a publicity uh,… pursuer that his name and soundbites get attached to everything.
Is “Jilly Juice” still a thing? I heard Jilly had spectacularly flamed out a couple of years back and gone offline.
Paul Davies … [is] a big proponent of the idea that Quantum Mechanical entanglement is an explanation for free will and consciousness…
I wrote a paper saying that very thing when I was in junior-high school. My work was smiled upon tolerantly and forgotten. And now my ideas are corroborated! Fools, all of them, laughing behind my back at the boy-wonder and building on my work. BUILDING ON MY WORK!!!
Completely off-topic. Feel free to delete this (not that I can stop you xD).
@PZ
I just looked at the sidebar and saw that Jesus and Mo is still listed. “Huh. Haven’t read that mildly amusing comic in years”, I thought. So I checked it out and it’s… kinda not great.
“Foreword by Jerry Coyne”, it proudly disclaims. And fucking Ophelia Benson spews her TERFy garbage under every second strip, going completely unchallenged by the comic’s author. The rest of the commentariat doesn’t seem much better.
Not saying it’s the worst thing ever. It’s not. But it looks pretty slimy at a glance. It may be time to re-evaluate that recommendation.
PaulBC @2: I recommend against rereading anything by Piers Anthony. His works have aged like dead fish.
pengothylacine@10–
Paul Davies is one of the reasons I stopped reading New Scientist. It used to be a regular read (I even subscribed for a few years), but the continued publication of absolute rubbish by Paul Davies and a few others made it clear that the editorial principle had changed from ‘science journalism for non-scientists’ to ‘science journalism without critical appraisal.’
klatu@28–
Seconded. Jesus and Mo followed Ophelia Benson into full TERF mode. It’s time to drop the recommendation.
I really need to go through all of those links and make sure they’re live and that they still go to good sites.
I think the metaphor here would be fuel injection rather than electronic ignition. :)
It’s not just cancer. The predominant message I’ve received from the medical/health/pharmaceutical/industrial complex is that if I get any malady it’s my fault because I failed to do all of the 10,000 things I was supposed to do or not do to remain healthy. So I pretty much avoid doctors except for unbearable acute pain relief. After all, why should they have to treat me when it’s my fault for getting sick or injured in the first place? I made my bed and all that.
@Ridana:
I can remember the reaction some 20 years ago when a prominent doctor here in Norway said that most diseases are “bad luck”…
Ridana, my problem with doctors is the opposite: That the guidelines they are following end up being less supportive of efforts to prevent disease. For instance, they won’t do anything to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes beyond admonishing people to lose weight until fasting glucose fall in the pre-diabetic range. They won’t test for fasting insulin or for hemoglobin glycation before that point. Which is totally backwards, as both latter measurements go off rails before fasting glucose, and anyway, I can measure my fasting glucose to my heart’s content myself if I want to, but not the other 2 measurements.
The only way I know to get tests outside of standard guidelines is via providers of so called ‘functional medicine’, who are practicing for-profit, and thus end up being very woo-adjacent.
I have been feeling breathless and tired for the last month or so ,managed to get a visit to my GP ,she said i had a chest infection and gave me a script for antibiotics ,didn’t seem to help so i am now on an inhaler .
Had a blood test today ,and going for a chest xray next week .
Might just be asthma from my sodding cats ,would not that be ironic ?
My twin brother had the same thing two years ago ,but he has two inhalers he takes twice a day ,and he hasn’t had an attack for months .
Being prone to depression and anxiety ,and not one to look on the bright side of life ,i am convinced i have Lung /Throat cancer .
Two members of my family died of cancer ,my mum and a older brother ,so if ever i met one of these quacks face to face ,i am likely to beat them to death with a chair leg .
Never smoked ,but spent nine years in that London as a motorbike courier breathing in all that bastard pollution ,back home in Shropshire for the last 23 years ,but i used to wear a tube thingy over my mouth ,and when i washed it out ,it would turn the water black .Plus i have a lot on my mind at the moment ,and i only have a tiny mind ,so it might just be stress .
Anyway sorry for the rant .
PS ,about Dr Coyne ,i used to read and comment on his site ,almost shown the door because i said anti Zionism is not the same as being anti Semitic .
Just after the GE last year ,i was sick to my stomach about that twat faced git johnson getting back in ,i went on a rant ,nothing bad really ,just said something along the lines of every tory ,the people who voted for them ,their families ,should be shot .
He gave me the choice of saying sorry ,or being banned ,i went for the latter .
Told him reading his site had been a blast ,and wished him well in his future travels .Haven’t been back since .