Athena Aktipis
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then maybe machinery then evolves that allows them to replicate together.
Now, you can imagine, though, early on in the evolution of that, if you had a cheater, right, that was actually replicating itself more than the others, that that cheater could then, you know, be overrepresented in the next generation.
And this is, you know, very, very likely what was going on in the evolution of, you know, proto-life, I guess we could call it, or maybe it's life if you think, you know, self-replicating entities are life.
How DNA works, how it replicates, there's actually like all of these cheater suppression mechanisms already built in.
And that's the only reason that it works is because there is a suppression of all of these sort of, you know, gene level.
So when we see, you know, fragments of DNA that over replicate or jump into new chromosomes and, you know, replicate themselves in there, rather than seeing something like weird and really unusual, we're just seeing the like uncovering of the like, you know, fundamental… Tensions that were already there.
Yeah, yeah, that were sort of overcome in what's called – these are called the major transitions in evolution, these times when previously independent entities kind of came together to form higher-level entities, which then allowed for more complexity and then yet higher-level entities.
So sort of coming together, regulating genes into a genome, having some –
teeter detection suppression response mechanisms at that level really is, yeah, it's one of the steps in kind of getting, you know, complex multicellular life, at least on this planet.
Yeah.
And that's where we get into multi-level selection again, too, right?
Because, you know, you had presumably little clusters all over, you know, the place doing this over long periods of time.
And those that were best at, you know, forming together, at replicating together, at suppressing cheating, were the ones that were more likely to
create copies of themselves at that higher level.
And so, so yeah, so multi-level selection is absolutely key for kind of understanding these major transitions in cooperation where you go from, you know, these lower level entities that are competing or just sort of facultatively cooperating, like in the right circumstances to kind of being locked in that they can only replicate as a unit together.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not a geneticist and expert in this, but I know that there are a lot of mechanisms by which you can get replication of these genes in the same place.
You can get them sort of jumping from genome to genome.
and that, you know, part of our sort of overall kind of monitoring of the genome that's happening, right, like the genome itself is monitoring itself, that it's not just, you know, sort of errors in terms of like point mutations, but places where there's, you know, too many replicates, right?
It's double stranded.
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