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

So first pass is multicellular life does suffer from this very issue.

Cancer is a problem for all multicellular life.

You know, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of people, you know, get cancer by the end of their lives.

So it is a problem.

Now, I think thinking has shifted a little bit in the last few decades around, you know, these ideas of group selection.

And I always kind of been like a.

an advocate for using like multi-level selection as the language.

Um, cause I think that the idea of, um, of group selection or the phrasing of group selection has been kind of like almost a political issue within, you know, within like evolutionary biology with people being like, Oh, I'm a group selectionist or I'm not.

Right.

So it's been sort of like a, almost like a marker of coalitional identity more than anything else.

And, um,

The fact is you can always get natural selection to act in situations that meet the criteria for natural selection.

And there are situations where groups can meet those criteria.

And so if you're in a situation where those criteria are met, then you should say, yes, group selection can happen when, you know, you have...

And you have, you know, differential fitness and you, you know, when when when you have situations where those criteria that you should just say, yeah, well, we'll have, you know, you can have selection acting on that level.

One way of looking at, you know, what happened in the transition to multicellularity is that you basically shifted, you know, from situations where you had, you know, individual cells getting selected to having groups of cells.

getting selected so so you could say you know that actually was you know

group selection or is continuing to be group selection in that we're made of 30 trillion cells that are cooperating and coordinating to make us viable.

I think that, you know, the way that a lot of people have sort of framed this in order to kind of stick with the sort of like individual level kind of analysis and individual level mathematical analysis is to say, you know, there's, well, there's a transition in individuality where you go from

you know, it being individual cells to now being organisms that are getting selected in their own right.

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