Defenders of Intelligent Design, other forms of creationism, and the "argument to design" (as a proof of the existence of God) commonly point to the complexity of life as evidence that it didn't develop by natural means alone. According to them, anything with such complexity as the eye couldn't have worked if only half-way developed, therefore it had to be "created" fully-formed. Curiously, they never cite as an example of such complexity the basic tumor. Why is that?
Carl Zimmer writes:
Cancer cells grow at astonishing speeds, defying the many safeguards that are supposed to keep cells obedient to the needs of the body. And in order to grow so fast, they have to get lots of fuel, which they do by diverting blood vessels towards themselves and nurturing new vessels to sprout from old ones. They fight off a hostile immune system with all manner of camouflage and manipulation, and many cancer cells have strategies for fending off toxic chemotherapy drugs. When tumors get mature, they can send off colonizers to invade new tissues. These pioneers can release enzymes that dissolve collagen blocking their path; when they reach a new organ, they can secrete other proteins that let them anchor themselves to neighboring cells. While oncologists are a long way from fully understanding how cancer cells manage all this, it's now clear that the answer can be found in their genes. Their genes differ from those of normal cells in many big and little ways, working together to produce a unique network of proteins exquisitely suited for the tumor's success.
All in all, it sounds like a splendid example of complexity produced by design. The chances that random natural processes could have altered all the genes required for a cell function as a cancer cell must be tiny--too tiny, some might argue, to be believed. And surely the only way that a cell could become cancerous naturally would be for all the genes to change at once. After all, what good is it for a cell to be able to increase blood flow towards itself if it can't grow quickly? Getting so many genes to change at once makes an impossibility an absurdity. By this sort of reasoning, you'd conclude that cancer is the work of a supernatural designer.
This matters because creationists want to be treated like scientists, but creationist writers have never offered an explanation for tumor - evolutionary biologists, however, have done just that:
Martin Nowak of Harvard University ... and his co-authors argue that you can't understand cancer unless you recognize it as an evolutionary process. As cells divide, they mutate on rare occasion (roughly one out every 10 billion cell divisions). Most of these mutations will kill a cell, so that the genomes in most of the new cells in your body are identical to the old ones. But a few of these mutations can allow a cell to divide more quickly than its neighbors. They begin to outcompete the ordinary cells for resources, becoming even more common. These cancer cells continue to mutate, so that there's lots of genetic variation in a growing tumour. In a few cases, these mutations make cells better adapted to a cancerous existence, and the offspring of these cells come to dominate the tumor. As the tumor matures, new kinds mutations may be favored--ones that let it metastatize, for example, or withstand the abuse of chemotherapy.
I'm sure that tumors aren't cited as examples of "intelligent" design because cancer doesn't sound very "intelligent" - after all, we're not really talking about some vague "designer," we're talking about God. Until defenders of creationism and Intelligent Design can incorporate things like tumors into their "science," they don't really have much to offer either the scientific or the education community.
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