Immunity
The Evolution of an Idea
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 16 August 2018
- ISBN 9780190914196
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages324 pages
- Size 231x155x20 mm
- Weight 499 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
In Immunity, Alfred Tauber sets forth a new theory of immunology that rejects the common principle of self and non-self, and the immune system's role as a protector of the self from external threats. Rather than serving to defend an independent entity, he argues, immunity participates in a large, complex eco-system of porous and flexible boundaries. Tauber's new approach to immunology necessitates a new biology in which symbiosis is the rule, not the exception.
MoreLong description:
Modern immunology traditionally conceives of the immune system as providing defense against pathogens. Alfred I. Tauber criticizes this conception of immunity as too narrow, because it discounts much of the immune system's other normal functions. These include active tolerance of nutritional exchanges with the environment and the stabilization of cooperative relationships with resident micro-organisms. An expanded account extends immunity's functional role from singular 'defense' to broadened discernment of environmental 'exchange.' This ecological perspective has profound theoretical implications, for the basic notion of immune identity is reconfigured: highlighting the organism as a holobiont (a consortium of diverse organisms living in cooperative relationships) challenges prevailing concepts of individuality and the self/nonself dichotomy heretofore organizing immune theory. Indeed, if theoretical interest is focused on the challenges of maintaining immune balance in the full ecological context of the organism, then immune regulation assumes new complexity. Tauber maintains that the key to unravelling that puzzle requires a critical re-assessment of the cognitive processes that underlie immune effector functions. Accordingly, he provides the outline of a re-formulated 'cognitive paradigm' that dispenses with agent-based models and adopts an ecologically conceived understanding of perception and information processing. The implications of this revised configuration of immunity and its deconstructed notions of individuality and selfhood have wide significance for philosophers and life scientists working in immunology, ecology, and the cognitive sciences.
no one can deny the unique pleasure to be gained in revisiting an old haunt or re-reading a favourite book. The latter is the type of pleasure in store for those readers of Immunity: the Evolution of an Idea who are familiar with author Alfred Tauber's formidable corpus of work on the philosophy and history of immunology. ... All in all ... Tauber's capstone is an admirable synthesis of his years of thinking about and engaging with the philosophy of one of the core tenets of immunology.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: A History of the Immune Self
Chapter 2: Whither Immune Identity?
Chapter 3: Individuality Revised
Chapter 4: Immune Cognition
Chapter 5: Eco-immunology
Chapter 6: A New Biology?
Epilogue
Endnotes
References
