Indeterminism in the Immune System: The Case of Somatic Hypermutation
Journal title PARADIGMI
Author/s Bartlomiej Swiatczak
Publishing Year 2011 Issue 2011/1 Language English
Pages 17 P. 49-65 File size 289 KB
DOI 10.3280/PARA2011-001004
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One of the fundamental questions of life sciences is one of whether there are genuinely random biological processes. An affirmative or negative answer to this question may have important methodological consequences. It appears that a number of biological processes are explicitly classified as random. One of them is the so-called somatic hypermutation. However, closer analysis of somatic hypermutation reveals that it is not a genuinely random process. Somatic hypermutation is called random because the exact outcome of this process is difficult to predict in practice. The case of somatic hypermutation suggests that there may be no scientific evidence of a single case of ontologically random process in the biological world.
Keywords: Determinism, Indeterminism, Philosophy of immunology, Somatic hypermutation, Randomness, Reproducibility
Bartlomiej Swiatczak, Indeterminism in the Immune System: The Case of Somatic Hypermutation in "PARADIGMI" 1/2011, pp 49-65, DOI: 10.3280/PARA2011-001004