Aligning Evolution Theory with the Mission of One Health

This review explores how the established elements of evolution theory can organize present day biological knowledge within the science base of One Health and facilitate One Health's mission to optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems. Background issues concern the ethos and operating environment of One Health and lessons learned from the past history of evolutionary biology including matters such as linguistics, ambiguities and vaguenesses, maleficent Social Darwinism and misguided eugenics, and failures to appreciate the nature of laws, theories and hypotheses within science. These failures justify the present review and were confirmed by a process of textual analysis on key documents from the history of evolutionary biology. The vehicle chosen for aligning evolution theory with the mission of One Health is an ontology as used in computer technology and artificial intelligence. Ontologies are concept maps founded on hierarchies of super-ordinate and successive subordinate concepts and are accompanied by precising definitions for all their components.