After learning CS I can’t help but see biology as crazy algorithms run on a living computer. Like someone was thinking “how can we match possibly any shape of invader? Screw it cells are cheap we’ll brute force randomly try them all.”

check this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_computing

Tons of biology can be modeled mathematically strikingly well, and most of that was figured out a long time ago. Sewall Wright was developing graphical models of evolution in the 1920s.

what you refer to is modelling of a selection of observed metrics not the biology itself. very different.

Everything in biology is observed metrics

It’s mind blowing not only how our body mimics natural selection with B cells, but also how it generates the genetically diverse B cells in the first place. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination "V(D)J recombination"

Yes, and if you have different versions of the HLA gene, you get different distributions as a result of V(D)J recombination.

So, in a way, different individuals have different immune strategies. For example, super-responders to HIV tend to be HLA-B57. This HLA "version" trades better response to virus that mutate quickly for more chances of autoimmunity as thymic selection is less stringent (because HLA-B57 presents less selfpeptides in the thymus).

Woah. Thanks for sharing that. I did not know that. What a fine balance!

Culture, intelligence, memes, innovation etc. are also evolutionary subprocesses of our species. Evolution is gradient descent, so is learning. It's all the same. Entropy minimization or competitive negentropy consumption, if you want.

yes, but this process is running inside a single individual. As above, so below.

Our brain also produces hypotheses, tests them and repurposes the most successful ones as program fragments stored in synaptic weights. Trial and error, exploration, mutation, survival of the best hypotheses etc.

extremely naive, dumb questeion: could cancer cells stem from some errant mutation of B cells? this might help explain why cancer cells grow uncontrollably and also escape detection by the immune system.

thanks for sharing this link. is it possible that other cancer cells are further downstream mutations of B cells?

> could cancer cells stem from some errant mutation of B cells?

That is exactly how lymphomas originate.

Also the replication machinery being easy to trigger is why it's the second most common cancer after skin cancers. (Which shares some of those features in addition to being even more exposed to insults and less controlled.)

Where do you get that figure from? All the figures I have state lung and bowel cancers are the most common, along with prostrate and breast for sex specific cancers (although looking at their rates they would be the higher even though their rates in the other sex are exceedingly low).

That's because melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer are split, as other lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma etc. in data despite affecting same cell lines.

If you sum these two up they end on top respectively in that order. Albeit prostate cancer is really close.

It's an artifact of grouping used. For colorectal for example, adenomas and carcinomas are lumped for a change.

Prostate is the second most common worldwide, or skin cancer, depending on year. The big 5 are over 1.5 million. (WCRF data. They lump all lung cancers but split immune system and skin cancers. For reasons? Bladder and lung cancer incidence is highly dependent on factors such as smoking and specific chemicals used in manufacturing. Potentially the same with colorectal and diet. Rates for breast and prostate are high because they're easy to spot and well tested. So per country data varies a lot.)

Non-melanoma skin cancer is usually excluded from registries due to differences across the world in data recording practices: https://www.ncri.ie/faqs/interpret-use-our-data/why-are-data...

is it possible that other cancer cells are further downstream mutations of B cells? thanks for sharing. sorry if these are dumb questions.

It is unlikely, given that B cells are already differentiated. This means that they are unable to change into another cell type.

thanks for the clarification.

phrased another way: could the same process that spawns these legions of B cells also inadvertently spawn cancer cells?

related: healthy cells exhibit properties that allow them to go ignored by the immune system, similar to a VIP pass for bypassing security at a basketball game. is this right? if yes, what are the minimal properties that constitute this cellular VIP pass?

thanks for your help.

B cells carry the same DNA as all other cells. The difference between cell types is in what sections are functionally expressed (made into proteins that do their work). This is determined by a multitude of factors.

Cancer cells typically have mutations, even just single base pair changes, which change the way that genes are expressed in the cell and thereby influence such behavior.

The original functions of the B cell aren't necessarily needed for other cell types to exhibit similar functions. The base plan is there, it just needs a nudge.

Yes! Exactly.

Unfortunately the thymus also loses mass in the process, so as you age, its function decreases.

And then we're replicating that in our computer systems :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_immune_system

That's cool, but realistically how else could it do it?

There are already examples of alternatives, like it could have some kind of brain and communication apparatus to work with others of its species and put together things like GPU simulations of protein modeling to generate optimized artificial antibodies.

How are you going to run a GPU sim on a bunch of meat?

I believe what is meant here is that the alternative is to have a highly developed capacity for abstract thought that you then use to collaborate with your species to develop antibodies in a laboratory (humans are an example of this, although we don’t rely upon this mechanism)

Yeah but how is that going to arise out of nature? It's like asking why birds use vision + magnetism to navigate when they could just use GPS -- the MVP is too massive and inflexible.