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

And then the mother system responds and the fetus responds, all completely unconscious.

But it can push the maternal body actually into a state where both the mother and the fetus are at risk in terms of their viability.

So it's...

interesting and scary and weird and cool um that you know you can have these systems where underlying it there's a lot of overlapping interests but if you start this sort of you know move and counter move and counter move and counter move and counter move you can end up right yeah exactly it's an arms race yeah and then everybody can end up dead

which fucking sucks, right?

It's crazy.

Sometimes I...

use the analogy of a tug of war, right?

And so what you have is a situation where, you know, the maternal interests are pulling on one end, and the paternal interests are pulling on the other end.

And every time, you know, one side tugs harder, the other side has to tug harder again, in order to just keep things in the same place.

And then, you know, if you end up with a mutation that interferes

with one of the genes that regulates how much is being pulled, then you can actually end up in a situation that is, you know, suboptimal for both parties.

It's outside of that range of, yeah, what would make sense, you know?

So it's like...

Yeah.

It's like, you've got like, you know, the balance in the middle and the, you know, yeah, the paternal interest would like it a little bit this way and the maternal would like it a little bit this way, but none of them want the rope to go slack and just, you know, have nothing in that, in that range at all.

Yeah, well, I mean, there are, I think, a few kind of constraints on the evolution of this.

I mean, one is obviously that if there's too much of a tension and you have mutations often enough that lead to, you know, a totally suboptimal situation, then the sort of more intensely competitive genes on the whole are going to be less favored.

because you can have these catastrophic outcomes.

And there's also, you know, you also have this sort of evolution of these regulatory pathways as well.

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