Multicellular cooperation
Multicellular cooperation is the set of coordinated behaviors that make a body work: restraint of proliferation, respect for cell-death signals, regulated resource use, division of labor, and maintenance of the shared extracellular environment.
Cooperation as enforceable agreements
Athena Aktipis frames these behaviors as agreements among cells — agreements that only hold if the body enforces them, because each cell retains the replicators and metabolic machinery of independent ancestors. The enforcement mechanisms are the familiar systems of cancer biology: p53-mediated arrest and death, apoptosis pathways, telomere limits, and immune surveillance. Each makes defection costly to the defecting cell.
Cancer as cheating
In this framing, cancer is what happens when cells break the agreements: they proliferate without permission, evade death, take resources beyond their allocation, stop doing specialized work, and damage the shared environment. Selection among cell lineages then amplifies the cheating, because a lineage that defects gains resources at the cooperators’ expense. The framework connects the molecular catalog of oncogenic behavior to the evolutionary logic of multilevel selection — a cancer is a lineage winning at the cell level while destroying the level above it.
The framework’s practical claim is that treatment should account for the cooperation structure of a tumor — cooperators and defectors, and the resources they share — rather than treating the tumor as a uniform mass of malignant cells.
Notes
- Draft stub — maintenance agent to expand with the Aktipis & Nesse “life history trade-offs and cooperation” papers and the AGORA agent-based modeling project.