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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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

And that's absolutely a legitimate way to look at it as well.

But all of this is really a matter of what assumptions you're making about, you

versus what constitutes an individual, when you want to make that mental or mathematical leap from what you're saying is a unit or not.

So I'm pretty pluralistic about this.

I think just like sort of open, talking about how like...

all the laws of physics apply, like at all scales, but in some, you know, some apply more than others, just because you're dealing with different kinds of entities.

I think that's the case with a lot of the, you know, mathematical and conceptual models around the evolution of cooperation that, you know, some

apply more at some levels than others.

And that it's useful to have many of these tools kind of in your toolkit to be able to use in the, you know, in the right context.

And multi-level selection, I think, is one of the ones that's like a little bit more general because you can, you know, be like, oh, this is a situation where the selection pressures are greater between groups because you have more variation between groups than within them.

for example, right?

So I think that it's a more broadly useful framework.

Yeah, I would just add it's not just the sort of immune system.

We have really three different levels on which you have monitoring and responses to cellular cheating.

So the first one, I would start with the cellular intrinsic mechanisms, i.e.

what the cell is doing on the inside to monitor what genes are being expressed, what proteins are being produced, what the cell is doing in terms of its physiology.

Genes like

TP53, they're basically like listening in on like all the stuff that the cell is doing from the inside.

And if it seems like the cells may be, you know, doing things that shouldn't be doing, then it, you know, raises an alarm.

And, you know, initially, like that alarm halts the cell cycle, you know, starts engaging the DNA repair process.

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