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Gerald Edelman

Overview

Gerald Maurice Edelman (; July 1, 1929 – May 17, 2014) was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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There is one point in his later view of the sciences, which appears to us a decided improvement on his earlier. He adds to the six fundamental sciences of his original scale, a seventh under the name of Morals, forming the highest step of the ladder, immediately after Sociology: remarking that it might, with still greater propriety, be termed Anthropology, being the science of individual human nature, a study, when…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Close in meaning to Gerald Edelman; the term itself is not named.
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True, biologists are not agreed on what is gained and what is lost between the day of birth and the day of death. There are those who hold to the continual growth in the volume of protoplasm from the birth of the cell right on to its death.[5] More probable and more profound is the theory according to which the diminution bears on the quantity of nutritive substance contained in that "inner environment" in which the…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Close in meaning to Gerald Edelman; the term itself is not named.
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In variations caused by the direct action of changed conditions, of which several instances have been given, certain parts of the body are directly affected by the new conditions, and consequently throw off modified gemmules, which are transmitted to the offspring. On any ordinary view it is unintelligible how changed conditions, whether acting on the embryo, the young or the adult, can cause inherited modifications.
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
Close in meaning to Gerald Edelman; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Gerald Edelman

Daniel Dennett

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Consciousness.

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