Questions on computing FI in cancer

OK, you can’t support your claim about FI in cancer, just make the same argument from personal incredulity. Got it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@Giltil You seem to have mixed up Thermodynamics and Information Theory (no foul, it’s a confusing subject). A good disambiguation here, but it’s important to read all the replies.

edit: changed links to a better source.

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This is pretty good too:

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I think this also does not follow. There must be many ways to mutate a normal lung cell and still have a perfectly functional lung cell. Even a cancerous lung cell might retain its essential lung-cell function.

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Entropy is information in the Shannon sense of the term. But entropy is the enemy of information in the sense of functional or specified information. This is why it is recognized that during carcinogenesis, the mutations and epigenetic alterations that occur reduce the functional information of the cell by increasing its randomness/entropy.

Still, there are much more ways for a cell to be a cancer lung cell than to be a normal lung cell. This is because mostly all the mutations that could occur in a normal lung cell without altering its lung function wouldn’t affect the function of the cancer lung cell either. But the opposite is not true. Indeed, many mutations that could occur in a cancer lung cell without altering the cancer function would affect the function of the normal lung cell.

If you think that is correct, then you can do more than just wave your hands at the question. These terms have mathematical definitions; show your work.

Still supposition. My suspicion is this claim cannot be written formally. Information in this sense is relative, and claims of information gain or loss are relative to some reference point, such as lung cell or cancer cell. A gain for one is a loss for the other. IOW: write this claim down, and I think you will find you are comparing apples to oranges.

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My claim is that the FI of a cancer cell is lower than the one of its non cancerous counterpart because there are more ways for a cell to be a cancer cell than to be a normal cell. I’ve given you the rational for this claim here Questions on computing FI in cancer
I can see you are unconvinced. Okay. But please consider that my claim is basic knowledge in oncology.
Pathophysiology of Cancer and the Entropy Concept | SpringerLink

There really isn’t a single type of cell that is a “lung” cell. Lungs are made up of a number of tissue types, such as alveolar cells, epithelial cells, endothelial cells, specialized resident immune cells, goblet cells, cells that produce structural features, etc. I don’t see how anyone can make broad statements about mutations in these cells with respect to function and cancer growth. More to the point, what do we see when we compare many different species and the many mutations that alter lung function in those different lung tissues?

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Here is the rationale for my claim

Notice also that the idea that carcinogenesis is a process that destroys the functional information of cells is basic knowledge in oncology. By denying this well established fact, you’re betting on the wrong horse :smiley:

This is incorrect.

Ok. So where is the evidence that supports the rationale?

It is correct

See here

Could we get more than just some bare links?

Where in these references do they go over the mutations that change lung function but in a functional sense?

LOL! Gotta love an evolutionist who would assert the snow is black just because an ID proponent would say it is white :slight_smile:
Did you at least bother to have a look at the two publications I gave that unmistakably support my claim.

My claim is that carcinogenesis is a process that destroys the functional information content of cells. The two publications I gave support this claim. Period.

So where do they use your equations for measuring functional information?

Neither of those two publications uses the term “Functional Information” anywhere. Did you at least bother to have a look at the two publications before touting them as ID evidence?

Good try, but that doesn’t work either for the information the authors are referring to is of the type that specified a function, ie, functional information. You don’t have to go very far to see this since the first sentence of the abstract of the first article is perfectly clear on this subject:

The storage and transmission of information is vital to the function of normal and transformed cells