One Earth + One Health: An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm

John Charles Little , Roope Kaaronen, Michael Muthukrishna, Sondoss Elsawah, Max Bennett, Inas Khayal, Janne Hukkinen, Michael Barton, Anthony Jakeman, Amro Farid

Evolutionary mechanisms enabled humans to profoundly transform Earth systems.  Because the resulting Anthropocene systems are highly interdependent and dynamically evolving, often with accelerating rates of cultural and technological evolution, One Earth and One Health must be framed and addressed in a holistic fashion.  An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm, which is based on a partially quantifiable, scientifically falsifiable theoretical framework, can be used to systematically identify, decompose, characterize, and then converge, a nested, evolutionary ensemble of geophysical, biophysical, sociocultural and sociotechnical systems.  The paradigm includes individual organisms (spanning plants, fungi and animals) engaging in niche construction in a global meta-ecosystem that integrates the deep evolutionary history of all Anthropocene systems.  To coherently span the vast range of scales, the paradigm is divided into a somatic realm (externally oriented with respect to individual organisms) that can be applied at global, regional, urban and local scales, as well as a visceral realm (internally oriented with respect to individual organisms) that includes organs, cells, organelles, genes and proteins.  The paradigm includes a causally coherent evolutionary framework, cross-scale, modular and hierarchical conceptual models based on a common language and reconciled ontology, with agile, extensible and scalable computational frameworks, an associated decision-support system and an educational pedagogy.