Abstract
The response to the title would simply be that the state of the organism has changed between the first and the seventh glass and that, before the seventh, this state was much closer to some kind of “homeostatic limit”. Although the external impact i.e. the glass of wine is identical in both cases, the reaction of the receptive organism might be different, depending on its current state: accept the first glass then reject the seventh. It is the couple “wine and current state of the organism” which is important here and not just the wine. Introducing this paper, I will attempt to clarify the famous self-nonself controversy by referring attentively to the debate which took place in 1997 between more traditional immunologists (Langman) and less ones (Dembic, Coutinho), and by proposing a very simple and illustrative computer simulation allowing a beginning of “formalization” of the self-assertion perspective. I will conclude by discussing the practical impact that such a perspective should have on the conception of “intrusion detectors” for vulnerable systems such as computers, and why a growing number of immunologists, like Varela twenty years ago, plead for going beyond this too narrow vision of immune system as “intrusions detector” to rather privilege its “homeostatic character”.
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Bersini, H. (2005). Why the First Glass of Wine Is Better Than the Seventh. In: Jacob, C., Pilat, M.L., Bentley, P.J., Timmis, J.I. (eds) Artificial Immune Systems. ICARIS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3627. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11536444_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11536444_8
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