User:Jtwsaddress42/Quotes/Edelman, Gerald M. 1974a

The Immune System as an Ideal Model for Studying Evolution in a Selective System "'Two major developments have profoundly altered immunological research in the last decade: the theory of clonal selection and the chemical analysis of antibody structure... As a result of these developments, it has become clear that the central problem of immunology is to understand the mechanisms of selective molecular recognition in a quantitative fashion. Aside from evolution itself, there are few such well-analyzed examples of selective systems in biology or in other fields for that matter. For this reason, the immune system provides a unique opportunity to analyze the problem of selection under defined and experimentally measurable conditions that have so far been hard to achieve in other Eukaryotic systems.  It is fortunate that the characteristics of the molecules and cells mediating selection in the immune response are known or can be known, and above all, that the time scale of the selective events is well within that required for direct observation and experimentation.'

Gerald M. Edelman (1974)"