Further notes about the morphostasis concept – split files

(35) The immune (or morphostatic) system may have evolved from an allo-competetive system

In case you are wondering, "allo-" infers from a related zygote derived colony from the same species. This contrasts with "iso-" that infers from an identical zygote derived colony (eg, monozygotic twins where transplantation between individuals mostly succeed because they are iso-grafts). When we look at the T-cell system (including natural killer T-cells) we can see that the system is preoccupied in paying attention to allo-specificities. Foetal conditioning in the thymus selects for T-cells that can recognise iso-specific elements of the Mhc molecules and then selects, from this pool, those that can be subtly altered, by a single short peptide chain, to look like allo-specificities. In this way, debris within the cell can then redeploy this ancient allo-recognition (often competetive) system as an "altered self" alerting system. Not all "altered self" needs destroying – quite the contrary; only those that are presented along with cell damage need to provoke an aggressive response.

There is a nice – readable – article in "Reefkeeping" magazine that acts as a good introduction and gives references to appropriate research articles .