Abstract
Immunology has been profoundly altered in the last decade by two major developments: the theory of clonal selection and the chemical analysis of antibody structure. As a result of these developments, it has become clear that the central problem of immunology is to understand the mechanisms of selective molecular recognition in a quantitative fashion. The molecules and cells mediating selection in the immune response are known or can be known and, above all, the time scale of the selective events is well within that required for direct observation and experimentation. Aside from evolution itself, there are few such well-analysed examples of selective systems in biology, or in other fields for that matter. For this reason, the immune system provides a unique opportunity to analyse the problem of selection under defined and experimentally measurable conditions which have so far been hard to achieve elsewhere.
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© 1974 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Edelman, G.M. (1974). The Problem of Molecular Recognition by a Selective System. In: Ayala, F.J., Dobzhansky, T. (eds) Studies in the Philosophy of Biology. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01892-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01892-5_4
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