Defending Life

Defending Life discusses the relationship between hosts and parasites. It contains detailed descriptions of the immune system and the microbial world as well as methodological and conceptual clarifications. Its emphasis on analytical abstractions, coherent patterns and generative mechanisms makes possible the distinction between genuine causality and coincidental associations and increases the understanding of why we observe what we observe.

A major contention of the book is that the immune system depends ontologically on the ecosystem in which it is embedded., it would not have the features it has if it was not related in one way or other to parasitic agents and to the host?s own cells and tissues. To sustain this argument, the book investigates life at all layers, from molecules up through cells, organisms and ecosystems. Together with the inverse course, which goes from ecological contingencies down to gene-expression profiles, this approach facilitates an advanced understanding of immunocompetence as well as its converse, immunoincompetence.

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""The book is highly recommended to those who want to dig into the scientific challenges involved in understanding the complex demands and tasks that nature had bestowed the immune system. ""

Professor Roland Jonsson, The Gade Institute, University of Bergen, Norway.

Immunologists, microbiologists, biologists, philosophers of science, medical scientists