Tackling ongoing crises with collective evolutionary knowledge

Abstract

Living organisms and their communities are evolving through time as a result of adaptation to stressors like competition or environmental change. While species also today compete for habitable space and adapt to temperature changes, stressors like antibiotic resistance and climate change can be described as grand challenges to our current human communities. However, humans are also the species that uniquely and actively can influence its own fate by leveraging knowledge of challenges ahead. What hinders us from a unified approach through research is that our understanding of grand challenges and how to meet them remains fragmented and curated within distinct disciplines. Developing a collective framework, requires breaking down disciplinary barriers, which comes at a cost to the research productivity of individual researchers. Here, we discuss how collective evolutionary insights are essential to identify, characterize, and tackle three emergent grand challenges and what lies beyond. We also assess solutions to ease the productivity burden to the individual researcher and propose a path forward to transform current siloed knowledge into impactful tools for tackling the oncoming global challenges.