ABSTRACT
The first thing to note is that cancer is a multi-stage process. It incorporates many diverse features that control the various levels of the genetic code. The changes that ultimately prove to be pathological may be initiated at any stage of the process of somatic change. Strictly speaking cancer should be associated with the state of an organism rather than its age. Each particular case is different but a sufficiently large set of individuals will exhibit statistical patterns since age is strongly correlated with the state of an organism. Disorders in the mechanism of change vary depending on the stage of life. At the phenomenological level, if consider an organism as a whole, biologists observed a certain correlation between organisms’ changeability and the respective frequency of cancer. As Lev Meckler points out, the tempo of evolutionary change in a given taxonomic class is correlated with the frequency of tumors it experiences.
