#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena
episodePreviously titled “#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
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What is the fundamental nature of cancer and cooperation?
Hey everyone, welcome back to our next holiday classic episode from back in 2023. I often cite this episode as maybe among our most unappreciated of all time, because I think many people read the title of it and mistakenly thought of it as an episode about cancer biology. And if they're not that into science episodes, then maybe they didn't really give it a chance. But this is actually an exploration of the fundamental forces of order and cooperation that arise at many different scales of organization throughout the universe. And how their success then creates the slack for defectors to flourish internally inside that order and undermine the corporation. But then how even within that disorder, even within cancers, the cheaters often start cooperating themselves through specialization and division of labor, which then creates the opportunity for hyper cheaters to exploit that cooperation inside the cancer, making it a sort of defection all the way down or cooperation all the way up, depending on whether you want to see the glasses half full.
While we're talking about cancer, though, have you ever wondered why it is that elephants with literally 100 times, I think more than 100 times more cells than human beings don't get cancer far more often? You'd kind of expect that because elephants, in a sense, have 100 times as many shots on goal, 100 times as many opportunities for a single cell to start to want to proliferate uncontrollably. And if elephants figured out a way to drive per-cell cancer rates to less than a hundredth the rate that human beings get, why, evolution couldn't be bothered to deliver the same benefit to human beings. But we don't only talk about the kind of corporation-defection dynamic. Athena and I also discuss multilevel selection, intergenomic conflict, and parent-offspring conflict theory, all of the juiciest stuff that I really enjoyed in my genetics undergrad degree.
The fact that paternal and maternal genes in a child, in a fetus, are engaged in a kind of eternal arms race of a resource extraction from the mother, one that can actually escalate into preeclampsia, threatening completely the interests of both parties, is among the more genuinely dark things I think I ever learned at university. So I couldn't be more excited to be re-releasing this episode to you today. Keep in mind, if you're watching rather than listening, that this was an episode from three years ago. So it's a video episode from long before we were typically doing video. And so it's not quite as beautiful, not quite the quality standards that you might be used to if you've been regularly watching us on YouTube this year.
But with that small caveat out of the way, I'm so happy to bring you Athena Actippus on why cancer is one of the fundamental forces in the universe. Today, I'm speaking with Athena Actipis. Athena is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, where she's the director of the Cooperation and Conflict Lab and the Human Generosity Project. Her research interests lie at the intersection of cooperation theory, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and cancer biology. She also started the Zombified podcast, where she and a co-host explore various ways that organisms, including people, could be tricked into ceasing to pursue the actual goals that they have or ought to have.
In 2020, she wrote The Cheating Cell, How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer, which is going to be the starting point for today's conversation and was a book that I really loved. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Athena.
Thank you so much for having me here. I am really excited to talk to you about all the things.
Yeah, I think some of my friends have been a little... It's been just cancer, cancer, cancer for me this week for my housemates and colleagues. I'm going to be able to get all of the cancer stuff out of my system and then stop hassling them about it. I can hassle all of the listeners all at once. Yeah, so I hope we're going to get to talk about what cancer really is at a theoretical level and what we might possibly be able to learn about societal cooperation from intercellular cooperation.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the fundamental nature of cancer and cooperation?
0:00–6:04
2
Why do elephants get cancer less often than humans?
6:04–1:04:58
3
What are the foundations of multicellular cooperation?
1:04:58–1:43:55
4
What is the analogy between cellular behavior and human cooperation?
1:43:55–1:47:25
5
How can we apply the concept of cancer to societal behaviors?
1:47:25–1:52:05
6
What are effective strategies for managing risks in a community?
1:52:05–1:56:14
7
How can humor help in discussing apocalyptic scenarios?
1:56:14–3:30:27
Speakers
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