What is the compelling question or challenge?
What mechanisms, motivators, and tipping points determine reversible versus irreversible changes - in organisms, behaviors, and systems - for the future of life on planet earth?
What do we know now about this Big Idea and what are the key research questions we need to address?
We have a promising foundation for paradigm shifting ways of approaching the transformational dynamics of the many kinds of systems shaping life on earth now and in the next several decades. We have increasingly nuanced understandings of human, animal, and environmental interactions and their impacts within and across ecosystems over time. A key aspect of these interactions is social, and collaborations between moral philosophy, economics, biological, and behavioral sciences have afforded us critical insights into what motivates organisms, including humans, to engage in seemingly altruistic, not just selfish behavior, with important implications for evolutionary theory and consequences for how we make predictions about phenomena as seemingly disparate as educational policy, market trends, and responses to epidemics and challenging environments. Similarly, epigenetic research that fosters collaborations between researchers in biology, chemistry, engineering, geoscience, and social science has altered the way we understand what is meant by environment as well as its role in shaping phenotypes: We are now examining the simultaneous impact of diet, toxic exposures, and even emotional experiences on the phenotypes of organisms as well as their offspring across generations. Interdisciplinary research is also transforming our understandings of other kinds of networks and their interactive effects on systems, whether in quantum physics, engineering, neuroscience, or behavioral sciences. Understanding patterns of interaction in driving or motivating change is at the core of science’s most enduring debates but as we consider the future of life on planet earth, we need to know with precision the thresholds and determining factors for reversible and irreversible changes. Key research questions include: What are the mechanisms for reversibility for different kinds of systems, whether disease processes and epigenetic changes or pending failure of systems whether they are biological, social, environmental, or artificial? What determines, and how do we measure, the tipping points for irreversibility?
Why does it matter? What scientific discoveries, innovations, and desired societal outcomes might result from investment in this area?
At a global scale, we have already surpassed tipping point for many kinds of irreversibility with respect to planetary warming and its cumulative effects on biodiversity, water and food resources, conflict, migration, and health. We cannot afford pessimism as a driver of research and discovery. Investment in understanding the transformational dynamics of systems through their mechanisms for reversibility and irreversibility can promote a paradigm shift in the framing of research questions. Scientific discoveries from investment in this area are expected to shift the limits of reversibility and generate novel understandings of the nature of adaptation, introducing innovations in how organisms, machines, and systems learn, repair, remodel, and adapt to minor as well as catastrophic assaults on their homeostasis. In epigenetic research for example, research on reversibility promises to produce knowledge about the ways that environmentally-shaped changes that adversely impact gene expression can be both interrupted and reversed. This will require more refined understanding of the interactive impacts of evolutionary adaptations and contemporary conditions. Interdisciplinary research on moral behavior provides another example. Current cutting-edge research has yielded important findings on human tendencies towards valuing fairness, but interpretations of fairness and when to cooperate differ individually and contextually. What conditions are necessary to motivate individuals and move social systems to expand the parameters of fairness and cooperation? Desired societal outcomes in this area would include commons-protecting shifts in the behavior of humans and social systems.
If we invest in this area, what would success look like?
Success would produce knowledge leading to positive changes that go further than building resilience in organisms and systems, to focus instead on the mechanisms by which systems and organisms alter their course and change direction. Key indicators of success would also include innovations in methodological approaches to measurement and experimental design, and would change the way we think about motivation, thresholds for transformation, and the requirements for reversibility.
Why is this the right time to invest in this area?
The push for interdisciplinary collaborations has attained a previously unparalleled level of success, so that the institutional and intellectual support for the necessary investment in the area proposed is already in place. The need for innovation with respect to environmental, health, and social problems is broadly recognized. We are poised for hopeful solutions to planetary problems.
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