Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.
> “We then realized they were a near perfect match to the cells of another species, the pullet shell.” The cells must have originated there before jumping into the golden carpets.
>
> Oddly, the pullet shells themselves show no signs of the cancer. They may have given rise to it, but they no longer suffer from it. Why? “One could imagine that the species-of-origin is now resistant to the tumor,” says Goff, “but we don’t know that.”
I suppose it's possible that one species could have evolved to develop and spread cancers that are more transmissible to some competing species than to itself. In that sense there could be some long-term evolution going on.
Entropy never comes into it because we are not talking about a closed system. So long as a creature can eat food, or synthesize it from the sun's rays, they are an open system taking in substances that give it fresh energy.
You could model this a few ways. You could say a creature exports its entropy by eating food, or you could say, more accurately, that the entropy was created when the energy was stored in chemical form in whatever substances the creature eats.
If there was some ultimate limit on the ability of creatures to communicate information forward then the aging process would apply to the entire species, to life itself, rather than to individual organisms.
You can think of yourself as an organism that was created a few years ago by your mother and father, but as a chemical process, you are 4 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years. There has not been a single second, in the last 4 billion years, when the chemical reaction that is you was not working to propagate itself forward. If entropy applied to you, then surely you would not have lasted 4 billion years?
I'm not a doctor, but I believe cancer is what we call it when cells that evade apoptosis proliferate to reach a critical mass. They metasttisize when they are able to survive a journey through the blood or lymph systems to invade other foreign tissues for food.
I don't believe it's necessarily due to entropy but the process by which cellular division takes place involves a copying of the host cell's DNA and that copying process is not 100% perfect. It is remarkalably accurate, but given enough time, even with all the systems in place to mitigate and repair errors, they will occur. Most will simply cause that mutated cell to die but it's similar to the 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters at scale. Eventually an error will occur that makes a cell immune from apoptosis.
Yes, basically. Cancer is at heart localized evolution, and there are many, many pathways which can provide survival or reproductive advantages to cells or tissue if they become dysfunctional.
