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

for using evolutionary approaches and adaptationist thinking to generate hypotheses that then you can test.

So I don't know how much you guys talk about adaptationism on the podcast, but the basic idea...

Okay.

Yeah.

So adaptationism is basically this idea that you can look at sort of the world through this lens of what's the function of things.

of, you know, like if an organism has some physical or behavioral, you know, characteristics, what is the function of that?

And it's a way of kind of, you know, bringing in an evolutionary perspective where you're kind of thinking of things as like,

You know, as if there's a purpose.

So you actually kind of use some of this language earlier of like, you know, bacteria are trying to survive.

Well, you know, they're not like, oh, how do I do this inside the body?

Right.

Yeah.

But they like behave as if.

They are, right?

And so, you know, one of the ways that you can kind of think of adaptationism is this, like, you know, you're looking at what's happening as if it is with the purpose of surviving or reproducing.

And so when you take that lens, thinking about cells in the body, you know, that come from the lineage that, you know, originated with the concept that was us, right?

It really starts to change things.

And

opens up all these possibilities for evolutionary and ecological processes that could be going on inside the body over the course of our lifetimes.

I have so much to say about this, so...

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