On the critique by Colin Anderson of 'A reply to Dembic: on an end to the beginning of mis-understanding the immune response'.
My proposal of a set of postulates that can be used to guide computer modeling has understandably met with significant criticism at two levels, semantic and conceptual. The major source of contention is my assumption that the sorting of the paratopic repertoire is both necessary and sufficient to explain the evolutionarily selected mechanism for the self-nonself discrimination. While 'necessary' is agreed upon, 'sufficient' is debatable as this commentary illustrates. My essay is in defense of 'sufficiency'.
Cohn
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Conceptual Immunology Group, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. cohn@salk.edu
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D006801:Humans; D007109:Immunity / Q000502:physiology*; D018448:Models, Immunological