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

But, you know, once you start having anything that is a replicator, right, it's going to have some –

level of complexity, right?

Even if you just think of like a replicator is something that when you know, it's out in the environment, maybe it attracts things that are similar to it, right?

So you could have like, a very, very simple molecule that's just like good at, you know, that maybe it has three parts, and each of those three parts can attract a thing that is the same as it and then it has some mechanism for like, you know,

Letting that other thing go and then that, you know, like a sort of self catalyzing process.

So at that level, even you could imagine that there could be variation among entities that are, you know, replicating or replicating.

Some are just not able to do that at all.

So there could be very, very sort of mechanistic kind of cooperation that's just, oh, well, how do these things attach together and what configuration and then how do the forces –

you know, at the level of the, you know, physics, like work at that, like, so there could be, you know, selection that's going on, on things that we think about as like the sort of chemistry and physics that are, that are, you know, leading to maybe selection for cooperation, but also the possibility that like, you know, cheating is undermining it, but it would be cheating in a very primordial kind of sense.

So, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So genetic conflict.

This is one of my favorite topics because it's just so weird, right, when it starts to manifest.

So, yes, it all kind of starts with the idea that, you know, we as sexually reproducing organisms are – we're not genetically identical to our parents or our offspring, right?

If you're, you know –

Typically, you're 50% related, right, to parents and offspring.

So if you have, you know, your mom and your dad, they each contributed 50% to who you are in terms of the genes.

And that means that you don't have 100% aligned interests with your kin.

Now, evolutionary thinkers often sort of focus on like this idea of, you know, kin selection, kin-based altruism, like parental investment, right?

So...

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