On Holy Curiosity: EcoHealth, Consilience and Academe

Louis Pasteur said: "Chance favors the prepared mind." EcoHealth is transdisciplinary--not multidisciplinary although this may become necessary when the higher goal cannot be met. The key distinction is that transdisciplinarity means deeply conversant with the literature and verbally fluent in the vernacular of three or more (post-baccalaureate) fields. The objective is to create the neuroanatomical substrate for consilience to occur spontaneously. Consilience, as defined by Whewell (1840), "...takes place when an induction obtained from one class of facts [field of study], coincides with an induction obtained from a different class..."?It is an epiphenomenal “aha” moment where true insight emerges that would not likely have appeared by only knowing one class of facts. Scholars prior to the 20th century were so deeply and broadly trained that transdisciplinarity was a natural outcome. Serendipity may smile on you and the celestial bodies align but Consilience will allow you to see her if you are prepared.??

An illustrative example is the work of Charles Darwin--when one reads his seminal books, you gain a perspective on this type of knowing, this brand of erudition. Any of his works would suffice, but have a go at his short book?Insectivorous Plants. (Darwin in an 1860 letter:?“…at the present moment, I care more about Drosera [sundew] than the origin of all the species in the world...”).??Academic specialization and siloing by the beginning of the 20th century balkanized knowledge and isolated specialists from one another due to the extensive vernacular that must be conquered in each discipline.??

I taught all the topics below over a 30-year academic career in anthropology, ecology and public health. Most were semester-length courses, the others were 2-3 week modules. If most were required for a MS, it would be a 3-year course-of-study before the thesis research. All together a 3.5-4 year program. Graduate students want to finish a Masters degree in 2-2.5 years so universities design degree programs for that timeframe. So, in Academia, transdisciplinarity can only be achieved through a terminal degree. Of course, the old scholars proved that you can be an autodidact and achieve transdisciplinarity without advanced studies so long as you don’t want a credential and don’t aspire to academic publishing. And, we learn by doing. All social mammals are sentient (along, of course, with most nonhuman beings). ?

Over the years of learning from thousands of students and hundreds of advisees, I’ve had three stellar students who pursued transdisciplinarity and made it through the necessary integrative exposure (not all solely with me): With an undergrad anthropology major, one went on to get MD and MPH degrees specializing in infectious diseases, was an elite CDC EIS field officer and published seminal work on the origin of HIV-1; another is a public health naturalist/disease ecologist/medical entomologist who worked for the CDC living in Africa and SE Asia, and eschewed an EIS position in order to accept a tenure track faculty position; and the third integrated cultural anthropology, epidemiology & biostatistics and nutritional science.?It’s a long journey, for true. ?

IMHO, here are the "classes of facts" which elicit consilience that should be pursued and--ultimately, but not immediately--acquired in order to practice novel Ecohealth. ?Depending on their specialty, other advisers will emphasize one or another fields. My background is in three of the four organismal (population-based) fields: anthropology, ecology, and public health so therein lies my bias. [The other organismal field is astronomy and I do have avocational expertise in ecospirituality and cosmology because...Consilience.] This list presumes: (1) that along with content delivery, the pertinent skills are imparted and practiced during coursework; and (2) that one aspires to field work in the global hotspots which are, of course, those remote areas of high biodiversity where (i) unknown/understudied pathogens reside and (ii) native people are living on the edge of survival by relying on millennia of indigenous knowledge and the wits gained by integrating a dozen or so human senses. (Aha, native consilience!) Should one undertake this process in Academe, it is necessary to be strategic and to always cross-pollinate content and skills. Do I retain the content and skills in each area? Of course not. You lose what you don't use and in our fast-paced modernity, upskilling is constant because the half-life and fads of technology and funding are often short-lived. In that sense, the Old Scholars truly lived in an ambient Ivory Tower.?Today, of course, it’s gratifying that so much of this content and coursework can be found online. ?

• History, theory and philosophy of Natural Science
• Cultural Anthropology & Ethnography
• Medical anthropology?
• Human nutrition and nutritional anthropology
• Population genetics and Population health
• Human population genetics & Human Variation/adaptation for health
• Comparative Anatomy and Physiology
• Infectious diseases epidemiology
• Public health history, theory and research design
• Quantitative and qualitative methods in public health
• Ecology: especially Community ecology & Behavioral ecology
• Mammalogy
• Entomology
• Ornithology
• Mathematical biology, including GIS applications
• Disease ecology
• Ecosystem botany and field identification
• Biogeography & bioclimatic zones
• Molecular biology, systematics and phylogeny
• Molecular lab techniques
• Field zoology lab and techniques
• Evolutionary biology and viral evolution
• Parasitology
• Medical entomology
• Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases?
• Implementation science
• Global Healthcare Delivery Systems

Parting Advice: Don’t be intimidated by how much there is to learn. After you’ve learned it all you’ll come to realize how little you know. Embrace what Einstein called “a holy curiosity”, the joy of learning, the journey and not the destination. Holy curiosity cultivates humility. Do be intimidated, however, by the awareness that one’s comfort zone is where dreams go to die. My own view is that transdisciplinarity weaves at least three content + skills areas. For those beginning de novo, I'd suggest starting with two areas and reading everything I could get my hands on. Then, I'd scour the internet for a scientist doing work in those areas that interested me. I would follow that person's work and, when the timing is right, I'd reach out to them with my passion and to volunteer on a field project. While I realize that the modern world mandates credentialing to get in the door, I'd emphasize the disease etiology principle of "necessary?and?sufficient" (See Koch’s Postulates.) In this case, credentialing is necessary but not sufficient. One also needs to remember that "experience" is the best teacher. Finally, I'd advise reading biographies or autobiographies of some field researchers you admire--Jane Goodall would be an excellent starting place. Also, there are a great many autobiographical works by giants in field epidemiology/emerging infectious diseases. How did these people follow their passions and what obstacles did they overcome? It is important to understand that anyone can have visions--even and especially the delusional--but a visionary is someone who discovers a roadmap to a place no one knew existed and takes others safely along on the journey, pointing out the rocks just below the surface so that they too can appear to walk on water.???

PS. It may seem an omission that Veterinary science is not listed. That, of course, would entail great content and skills for the practice of EcoHealth, but like human medicine and human-health professions in an egregiously individualistic society, veterinary medicine is a clinical field that does not take a population-level approach. I’ve worked with and admired many field veterinarians but only one or two understood a populational approach as it simply was not intuitive. Advanced training typically creates tunnel vision. As my MA advisor told me: the way we see the world is through the “prescription lenses” our primary discipline proscribes and you need to take them off from time to time to appreciate how they bias your vistas. I recommend opting for “trifocals” but also removing them on a daily basis. Consilience will reveal herself to you!?

Green Frog in a Pitcher Plant Bog (C) Nancy Nisbett