#94 Athena Aktipis: Cooperation and Conflict, From Cells to Human Societies
Dr. Athena Aktipis is Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University, co-Director of the Human Generosity Project and Director of Human and Social Evolution, and co-founder of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the University of California, San Francisco. She is a cooperation theorist, theoretical evolutionary biologist, and cancer biologist who now works at the intersection of these fields. She will be having a book coming out in the near future, Evolution in the Flesh: Cancer and the Transformation of Life.
In this episode, we talk about what game theory is, and how it works; conflict between the mother and the fetus in the womb; walk away vs the traditional tit-for-tat cooperative strategies; the osotua system of the Masai, a need-based cooperative system; principles that rule interactions from the cellular to the societal levels, and how they can be applied to develop better tools to fight cancer.
Time Links:
How game theory works
Maternal-fetal conflict
Walk away vs tit-for-tat
The Masai and the osotua system
Common interaction principles from cells to human societies
Can these principles help us fight cancer?
The shortcomings of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and the potential of adaptive therapy
Dr. Aktipis’ work and upcoming book!
Follow Dr. Aktipis’ work:
Personal website: http://www.athenaaktipis.org/
Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y7zymzjm
Articles on Researchgate: https://tinyurl.com/yckwpbjk
Twitter handle: @AthenaAktipis