Paul Davies is not a medical doctor

He’s not a biologist either, and in fact has no training in the life sciences at all. He keeps saying things that are flat out wrong, yet somehow, he’s treated as a credible authority on cancer. Which means he gets a lengthy, credulous puff-piece in Newsweek in which he gets to claim a new theory on cancer: what we know about how it starts could all be wrong.

Over the course of several years spent pondering cancer, Davies has come up with a radical approach for understanding it. He theorizes that cancer is a return to an earlier time in evolution, before complex organisms emerged. When a person develops cancer, he posits, their cells regress from their current sophisticated and complex state to become more like the single-celled life prevalent a billion years ago.

Oh, also…Davies is not an evolutionary biologist, and he gets evolution all wrong, too.

The evidence that cancer is an evolutionary regression goes beyond the ubiquity of the disease. Tumors, says Davies, act like single-celled organisms. Unlike mammalian cells, for example, cancer cells are not programmed to die, rendering them effectively immortal. Also, tumors can survive with very little oxygen. To Davies and his team, which includes Australian astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver and Kimberly Bussey, a bioinformatics specialist at ASU, that fact supports the idea that cancer emerged somewhere between 1 billion and 1 and a half billion years ago, when the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was extremely low.

I’ve been covering this bullshit for years, do I need to cover all the details again? In short:

  • A standard defense against damaged or infected cells is triggering cell death. It is not surprising that cancers that survive have mechanisms to defeat the most common defense. It is also not true that all mammalian cells are programmed to die; germ line cells are also effectively immortal. Cancer does not need to roll back a billion years to find a way around apoptosis and senescence, but only have to activate genes already present for in all cells for contemporary purposes.

  • Tumors can survive in little oxygen…but this is a capability of healthy cells, too. This is not an atavistic property. Go exercise; your muscles will be starved for oxygen, and those tissues will be under low oxygen tension. Your muscles don’t die under anaerobic exercise. Brain and retina cells also have high metabolic demands, they don’t die every time you think, but just carry on with glycolysis.

Simply put, cancer behavior is not explained by some mysterious regression to a billion-year old program of the old ways. It simply exploits properties that are inherent to healthy modern cells. Inventing some kind of bizarre cellular memory of being a free swimming protist does not work and makes no sense — it’s more of a 19th century idea that has been rejected by the evidence. All of his claims are better explained by recruitment of modern, existing molecular pathways, rather than by some mysterious hidden single-celled ancestor still lurking in your genome.

Many oncologists are skeptical that it ever will. Evolutionary biologist Chung-I Wu, at the University of Chicago, calls the atavistic theory “an extreme position.” Scientists have also criticized Davies’s reference to the discredited “recapitulation theory” that human embryos develop temporary vestigial organs—gills, a tail, a yolk sac—as support for the atavistic model. “I’ve been ridiculed by the biology community,” says Davies.

Yes. Ridicule is what he deserves. Haeckel’s theory was wrong, but it’s the only theoretical foundation for his claims. Haeckel also argued that evolution proceeded by adding new layers of programming on top of deeper layers, and that peeling back recent hereditary factors would expose older patterns of development. It’s not true. Development and evolution don’t actually work that way.

Like quacks everywhere, Davies falls back on the excuse of medical venality — the doctors are all paid off by Big Medicine or Big Pharma to promote methods that don’t work, to keep the cash flowing in by prolonging the suffering of their patients. It’s not just a lie, it’s an offensive lie — Davies has no respect for the hard-earned knowledge in oncology, so he promotes his bogus treatments that, he claims, will do an end run around the failed policies of modern medicine.

Ironically, Davies now gets paid by a branch of Big Pharma.

Davies is unfazed by the objections. “My feeling is, Who cares? The idea was to come in from the outside and lend a fresh perspective,” he says. Davies sees the criticism as largely rooted in territoriality and financial concerns. “Cancer is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s been running for decades. There’s a lot of vested interests out there.” After five years with the NCI program, Davies is now funded by NantWorks, a sprawling private health care company owned by scientist and billionaire investor Patrick Soon-Shiong (who made his fortune reworking the breast cancer drug paclitaxel to be more effective) to continue his work developing the atavistic model.

He hasn’t helped a single cancer patient, but he’s profiting nicely off of them, and further, is getting these ridiculous, clueless media promotions from credulous journalists. It’s a disgrace.

Paul Davies belongs in the ranks of medical frauds, like Dr Oz or Gwyneth Paltrow or Joseph Mercola.

And dear god, I just wish he’d learn a little goddamned humility. Being a physicist does not turn one into an omniscient god, master of all sciences.

The biggest risk that we face as a civilization

You’ll never guess what it is…or at least, what Elon Musk thinks it is.

Elon Musk warned a gathering of U.S. governors that they need to be concerned about the potential dangers from the rise of artificial intelligence and called for the creation of a regulatory body to guide development of the powerful technology.

Speaking Saturday at the National Governors Association meeting in Rhode Island, the chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla Inc. and rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp. laid out several worst-case scenarios for AI, saying that the technology will threaten all human jobs and that an AI could even spark a war. It is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization, he said.

We’re in the midst of total political collapse, the Antarctic ice shelf is breaking up, we’ve got roving gangs of lunatics thinking their most important right is the right to carry rifles everywhere, new diseases are creeping northwards, bacteria are evolving to make our antibiotics obsolete, mad dictators are building nukes and ICBMs, and conservative loons want to undermine all of education.

There are a great many threats that are far more pressing than fear of Roko’s basilisk. Musk needs to stop reading weird techno-libertarian fetish fantasy sites and come back down to earth.

Don’t come to America

Honestly, if you’re thinking of moving here or even just vacationing here, don’t. You’ll get shot. By the police.

They’re out of control. They’re armored up, loaded with weapons, and poorly trained. 661 people have been murdered by the police this year, so far. It’s insane.

The latest incident occurred nearby, in mild, liberal Minneapolis. An Australian, Justine Damond, was shot for no good reason. She had apparently called the police to report a disturbance in an alley.

Three sources with knowledge of the incident said Sunday that two officers in one squad car, responding to the 911 call, pulled into the alley. Damond, in her pajamas, went to the driver’s side door and was talking to the driver. The officer in the passenger seat pulled his gun and shot Damond through the driver’s side door, sources said. No weapon was found at the scene.

“Two Minneapolis police officers responded to a 911 call of a possible assault just north of the 5100 block of Washburn Avenue S. just before 11:30 p.m. Saturday,” the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said in a news release. “At one point, an officer fired their weapon, fatally striking a woman.

“The BCA’s investigation is in its early stages. More information will be available once initial interviews with incident participants and any witnesses are complete. … The officers’ body cameras were not turned on at the time and the squad camera did not capture the incident. Investigators are attempting to determine whether any video of the incident exists.”

So, like, he just accidentally fired his gun across the car, past his partner, through the door, and into a woman in pajamas? He drew a weapon, but conveniently ‘forgot’ to turn on his camera?

No, really, don’t come here. And if by some frightful series of events you happen to end up here, under no circumstances should you call the police — they’ll just show up and randomly spew bullets. It’s all they know how to do, and they aren’t even particularly competent at that.

I’ll never be able to read Matt Taibbi again

I’ve enjoyed his scathing, ferocious approach to political reporting, but I just learned today that he takes the same ferocious, scathing approach to women. He and Mark Ames were columnists writing for an expat paper in Moscow years ago, and they apparently had a grand time being outrageous. When I first read a few quotes, I thought for a moment that they had to be faked — that these were ginned-up accounts written up by political enemies, of which they have more than a few.

But no. These were their own words. They wrote them up in a book-length account of their adventures in Russia. They were bragging about these attitudes.

It’s not ironic–Ames and Taibbi explicitly scorn the bourgeois safety net of irony–and it’s not just a rhetorical stance. “You’re always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blow jobs,” complains their first business manager, an American woman, in chapter six, “The White God Factor.” “It’s not funny. They don’t think it’s funny.” “But…it is funny,” replies Taibbi. They take particular glee in trashing several former female staff members in print, taking multiple potshots at the aforementioned business manager’s “gorilla ass.” They’re equally nasty to her replacement, who quit in disgust after they went on a four-month “brain-sucking speed binge.”

It’s OK if you want to stop there. It gets worse. Much worse.

[Read more…]

I’m going to be famous now!

I’ve been cited in Charisma magazine! Surely respect, honor, and glory will follow in the wake of this awesome acknowledgment.

I am mentioned in the context of explaining how octopus suckers work. Unfortunately, the rest of the article is about getting possessed by squid demons.

After this squid spirit attacked my friend, I went to her home to help her battle it. The attack was severe, but when I laid hands on her and commanded the squid to be bound, the most violent symptoms would cease. Of course, when you stand in the gap, you often take a hit. That squid spirit started stalking me. I ended up with a migraine during the battle—a manifestation of that mind control spirit—and was attacked in my mind for days afterwards.

Fear can open the door to a squid spirit. Of course, unforgiveness is an open door for the enemy. But let’s face it: The enemy doesn’t need an open door to attack. He can strike when we least expect it, which is why we’re to live in a battle-ready state and walk with the Spirit of God who can warn us of impending attacks.

The good news here is a squid’s tentacles do not grow back once severed. If you get discernment that a squid spirit is attacking you, repent for any known open doors, grab some intercessors, and get that sneaky stalker with its manipulating suckers off your mind! Sever the tentacles, in the name of Jesus, and walk free.

Dammit. Cancel the celebration, forget the promotion, I’m not moving to the corner office after all, and I guess I don’t have to hang around waiting for the phone call from my agent after all.