Re:Why cancer cells waste so much energy
by benibela on Friday January 15, 2021 @09:45AM
(#25791508)
When the escalator malfunctions, you get a staircase
Well I wouldn't say the multicellular system is reverting to a single older cell phase per say. Rather it needs NAD+ so it optimizes for that. The cells also lose adhesion and then migrate so clearly there's some "programming exception" not being caught. I view the cell as a bunch of copy paste code that's had some degree of refactoring applied so there are different programs and control systems in operation at any given time. Sometimes these get activated or not repressed erroneously, sometimes the source code gets scrambled.
Myers is very outspoken in his rejection of the idea, but even as an amateur I can see rhetoric sleights of hand in his argumentation. An example:
These “layers” don’t exist! When my car malfunctions, I don’t get a horse
Bad comparison, a car did not evolve from a horse, there is no mechanism for it to have a previous "horse layer".
Myers seems to hate the idea so much and return to it so often and with so many damnations and so few citations that it actually decreases his credibility in my eyes.