Athena Aktipis

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1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

Yeah, that's right.

And so there's a sort of version of this that just applies to like all life that evolves, which is that organisms, you know, in general have tradeoffs between surviving and, you know, taking care of their bodies, maintaining their bodies and reproducing.

And so, yeah.

Depending on whether an organism is prioritizing survival or reproduction, that's going to change how their physiology and behavior manifests.

And it can have a lot of knock-on effects then that are self-reinforcing, right?

So basically, you know, a mouse is a fast life history strategist, we would say.

It's, you know, invests in...

becoming reproductive quickly, having lots of offspring, and doesn't invest a lot in its soma, in its body, in things like cancer suppression.

An elephant, on the other hand, grows big, grows relatively slowly, has fewer offspring, but invests a lot more in each of them, and does a lot more somatic maintenance, does a lot more taking care of the body itself, which is necessary,

if you're going to be able to stick around long enough to successfully reproduce if you're a slow life history organism.

I love this.

And I mean, you're just like being like the adaptationist engineer right now.

You're like, all right, how are we going to design this thing for this function or that function?

And yeah, I think it's a great cognitive tool to use to just like wrap our minds around, like, how are things going to evolve given constraints?

And, you know, what kinds of adaptations would we expect given that you want an organism to be able to do this thing?

Right.

So.

So, yeah, I think, you know, the engineering metaphors are right on for thinking about, you know, how do organisms evolve to, you know, maximize that combination of survival and reproduction that, you know, that whatever that is.

Combination is that they're sort of, you know, aiming for or choosing.

Again, I'm using scare quotes just because, you know, we're using this like as if intentionality as a shortcut for thinking and talking about something that is a long, complicated process of natural selection acting on all of these, you know, mechanisms.

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