Cancer as Metabolic Reversion: A Displacement Framework Account of the Warburg Effect and Ancestral Ground State Recovery

We apply the displacement framework to cancer biology, proposing that malignant transformation is best understood as reversion to an ancestral metabolic ground state () rather than as departure from a healthy one. Normal multicellular cells are held at a cooperative ground state () by continuous signaling — a maintained displacement from the deeper ancestral attractor. When this forcing fails, cells relax toward: a fermentative, growth-maximizing, apoptosis-ignoring configuration matching pre-multicellular metabolism.

The Warburg effect --- aerobic glycolysis in the presence of oxygen --- is identified as the metabolic signature of this reversion. Treatment is framed as a separatrix management problem: restoring the basin boundary between and rather than destroying the reverted cell. The framework aligns with and extends the cancer atavism hypothesis davies2011 and provides thermodynamic grounding for observations in metabolic oncology hanahan2011,warburg1956.