Athena Aktipis

Athena Aktipis is an American evolutionary psychologist and cooperation researcher, professor of psychology at Arizona State University, known for framing cancer as a problem of cellular cheating within multicellular cooperation and for her work on human generosity.

Cancer as cheating

Aktipis’s central framing treats multicellular life as a cooperative system built on a set of enforceable agreements among cells: restraint of proliferation, respect for the control of cell death, regulated resource use, performance of specialized work, and maintenance of the shared environment. Cancer, in this view, is what happens when cells break these agreements — cheat — and selection among cell lineages