Just hubris?
. . . . if you like.
But how else do I make people listen and understand without ramping up the provocation?
And this might get you to realise what I believe (it's in the same vein as morphostasis and the zygote derived colony):
"It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: is it true in and for itself?" G. W. F. Hegel, 1770-1831.
No one person can create any concept out of a vacuum. Whatever proves to be the "correct" conception will be a 99.99999% communal intellectual activity that starts with us learning to speak, is expanded in our higher education and culminates in the communal application of that education and our aggregated knowledge. A single neuron doesn't make a mind any more than a single brain commands an intellect. Intellect is far more an emergent property of the communal than the individual self. I hope no one feels that I am in any way or at any time thinking of claiming sole "animal" rights for any of these concepts. History, at least, has always solved that one. There are always a number of minds thinking along the "realisation" lines. We can trust historians to squabble over the question of credits – like jackals over a carcass. Anyway, does that matter at all when understanding is at stake?
I suspect there is some annoyance that I don't reel off all the relevant credits to those who have evolved concepts of importance in immunology. I'm not a historian of immunology – to me it's a hobby/obsession. Medical Hypotheses asks authors to keep the references to a frugal minimum.
I'd like to add one thought of my own; that merit should be attributed to the conception rather than to the conceiver. Should the conception I have proposed be dominantly right then the important object is to get it tidied up and weed out the rubbish that I have undoubtedly introduced.
It is worth asking yourself this set of questions:
- Do phagocytes have anything to do with morphostasis? (ie, "tissue homeostasis")
- Do gap junctions have anything to do with morphostasis?
- Is gap junction activity altered when a healthy cell becomes sick?
- Do gap junctions have a function in alerting adjacent cells of a problem?
- Do gap junctions help spread a wave of suicide to adjacent cells under certain circumstances (like the plant hypersensitivity response).
- Are gap junctions important in macrophage activity?
- Is it possible to look at everything we have considered to be self/non-self (or pathogen/non-pathogen) discrimination and restructure it under a morphostasis paradigm? (This is rather like holding back the tide of entropy – Zlatko Dembic's approach).