According to the Free Dictionary evolution is a. change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.
Dear Vilemar, we must distinguish two sorts or levels of the immune system. On the one hand, there is the natural immune system that nearly all living beings have. On the other hand there is the adaptive immune system that has evolved over about the last 400 million years and that is particular to the vertebrates.
We, human beings, do have both, but by and lare the most important is the adaptive IS. (Let me stress that there are not two IS, but one).
Smack to the point: the adaptive IS has been evolvng over the years and it onstitutes one of the two modes by which we human beings have memory, namely the brain and the IS.
(I can say a few more things, but this goes, I beleive, right the point of your question.)
Dear Vilemar, we must distinguish two sorts or levels of the immune system. On the one hand, there is the natural immune system that nearly all living beings have. On the other hand there is the adaptive immune system that has evolved over about the last 400 million years and that is particular to the vertebrates.
We, human beings, do have both, but by and lare the most important is the adaptive IS. (Let me stress that there are not two IS, but one).
Smack to the point: the adaptive IS has been evolvng over the years and it onstitutes one of the two modes by which we human beings have memory, namely the brain and the IS.
(I can say a few more things, but this goes, I beleive, right the point of your question.)
Dear Carlos, thanks a lot. Your contribution was highly appriciated. I will go back to my studies and review these two levels of immune systems. Do you think that the natural immune system has evolved as the adaptative immune system?
Your definition of evolution is also overly restrictive. While evolution may lead to speciation, it does not have to. Evolution can and does occur within populations without overt speciation, since a species itself is not a static entity, but a genetically diverse population(s) of organisms.
Gee! And all these years i thought that evolution was adaptive phylogenetic change in the form and behavior of organisms. If gene-substitution constitutes evolution, for what did we do all that hard work digging up fossils?. If that work wasn't to demonstrate "evolution", then what exactly was it for? And didn't people write about evolution before we knew about genes? But perhaps, one gets what one pays for in dictionaries, just as one does in many other areas of life.
Apart from the definition of evolution, you question is a very interesting one, and similar to questions about the "evolution of learning". Learning and immune systems are similar in that they are responses to unpredictable situations.
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