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

We see that.

We see also, you know, maintenance of the shared environment, right?

Like that's, you know, we have...

In our cities, we have our trash collection.

We have lots of efforts that people do to take care of the environment that we share.

So I think that there are a lot of parallels.

And then there are some interesting discontinuities that I think it can be informative to think about those and talk about those in terms of, well, why do they not

happen in exactly the same way how much of that has to do with the levels of selection right like our bodies have been selected on this level of all the 30 trillion cells like doing a thing together to help us survive and reproduce while you know in humans arguably there's been a lot less selection on collective phenotypes so I think yeah there's

Yeah.

And then there's also, you know, in humans, there's a whole other set of processes that have to do with culture and institutions.

And, you know, yes, we have set those up are, you know, they've come from us in a way to like, then allow us to regulate ourselves in collectives.

But they're, you know, they're not necessarily going to have the same, you know, structures and functions exactly as the, you know, systems that have evolved through natural selection to regulate a multicellular body.

So, so yeah, so there's a, there's a lot more that we, I mean, we could probably talk about just this for an hour, but.

We could never have society break down because of bad information.

Yeah, I mean, there there's certainly, you know, the ability to think ahead and plan ahead changes the sort of decision making process.

But, you know, also, if you have evolution happening, you know, over and over again, or you have evolution happening, you know, in multiple clusters of, you know, cancer populations.

you know, cells that are, you know, little collectives, and, you know, it's happening 25 times, you know, in parallel, like, right, you can get variation and selection acting in ways that can look kind of like things like, you know, learning and anticipation, even though that's not actually what's going on.

So yeah, you can have different mechanisms, leading to sometimes, you know, the same kinds of structures and, and behaviors, which is also, which is also interesting.

Yeah.

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