Almost as important is that the mutations that are found seem more randomly distributed than would be expected if they caused consistent types of malfunctions.
Can you expand on this? I can’t help but think of performance problems caused by software extensions as an analogy; these are often quite randomly distributed, with there being many different kinds of extensions that can cause program activity to expand uncontrolledly. Shouldn’t we expect the same with mutations?
The beginning of this comment is how Lintern expands on that claim. But it sounds like you have an objection that isn’t well addressed there.
If cancer merely involved one bad feature, I could imagine software analogies that involved a large variety of mistakes producing that one bad feature.
The hallmarks of cancer indicate that all cancers have a number of bad features in common that look sufficiently unrelated to each other that it seems hard to imagine large sets of unrelated mutations all producing those same hallmarks. Lintern lists many other features that could be considered additional hallmarks.
When I try to imagine software problems that seem analogous to cancer, I come up with problems such as spam where there’s an optimizer that’s generating the problems.
I’m unclear whether you’re imagining software problems that I haven’t thought of, or whether you’re modeling cancer differently from me.
Can you expand on this? I can’t help but think of performance problems caused by software extensions as an analogy; these are often quite randomly distributed, with there being many different kinds of extensions that can cause program activity to expand uncontrolledly. Shouldn’t we expect the same with mutations?
The beginning of this comment is how Lintern expands on that claim. But it sounds like you have an objection that isn’t well addressed there.
If cancer merely involved one bad feature, I could imagine software analogies that involved a large variety of mistakes producing that one bad feature.
The hallmarks of cancer indicate that all cancers have a number of bad features in common that look sufficiently unrelated to each other that it seems hard to imagine large sets of unrelated mutations all producing those same hallmarks. Lintern lists many other features that could be considered additional hallmarks.
When I try to imagine software problems that seem analogous to cancer, I come up with problems such as spam where there’s an optimizer that’s generating the problems.
I’m unclear whether you’re imagining software problems that I haven’t thought of, or whether you’re modeling cancer differently from me.