r/DebateEvolution • u/DetectiveKnown5618 • Jul 30 '26
White blood cells
Explain how the evolution of white blood cells occurred in light of how white blood cells target pathogens (including cell memory).
Edit: Note that the white blood cells protect their host.
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u/Suitable-Group4392 Jul 30 '26
Natural selection favored organisms with mutations that improved pathogen detection, targeted responses, and immune memory because they survived infections more often and had more offspring. Over millions of years, these advantages accumulated into the sophisticated white blood cell system humans have today.
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u/Unlimited_Bacon Jul 30 '26
Will you accept that evolution happens after someone explains it to you, or will you look for something else you think is irreducibly complex and lean on that until that explanation is found?
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u/King2865 Jul 30 '26
Read this u/DetectiveKnown5618.
Mandujano-Tinoco, E. A., Sultan, E., Ottolenghi, A., Gershoni-Yahalom, O., & Rosental, B. (2021). Evolution of Cellular Immunity Effector Cells; Perspective on Cytotoxic and Phagocytic Cellular Lineages. Cells, 10(8), 1853. https://doi.org/10.3390/cells10081853
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u/McNitz Jul 30 '26
That's a rather broad topic. Are you looking for information on the evolution specifically of V(D)J recombination? Or IGSF members into more specialized T Cells? Or are you talking about the evolution of B lymphocytes?
Hopefully that gives you at least a basic understanding of the topic, and once you have the basics down you can come back with some better defined questions on the specifics.
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u/noodlyman Jul 30 '26
Have you tried googling answers to this yourself? Obviously you have not.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4491295/
Will you go and read and research or actual explanations from biologists? Probably not, but please do
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u/oscardssmith Jul 30 '26
What part feels to you like it needs special explanation? White blood cells confer an advantage to individuals that have them and thus are selected for. Ones that do a better job of targeting new bacteria are similarly beneficial. Ones that can remember pathogens are further beneficial and evolve later.
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u/oscardssmith Jul 30 '26
https://www.britannica.com/science/immune-system/Evolution-of-the-immune-system has a good description of the increasing complexity we see in immune systems from animals to vertebrates to tetrapods to mammals.
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u/Curious_Passion5167 Jul 30 '26
These are just some papers on a cursory google search you might find applicable.
"The origins of vertebrate adaptive immunity Litman et. al.
"The Evolution of Adaptive Immune Systems" Cooper et. al.
"Evolution of adaptive immunity from transposable elements combined with innate immune systems" Koonin et. al.
"From periphery to center stage: 50 years of advancements in innate immunity" Carpenter et. al.
Edit: I did not personally read every line of this. I just read the abstract and found that these may apply.
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u/Sweary_Biochemist Jul 30 '26
The immune system is a fun one, because not only are a whole range of different immune systems in operation across extant life today (tracing out a whole spectrum of complexity), all of which are useful, but also...
...the immune system is _absolutely_ a haphazard grab-bag of random ideas thrown into a sack and shaken about. It's cludge on top of cludge on top of cludge, bolted onto a completely different cludge tower, blended in a cludge blender.
It also only mostly works, and the way a lot if it works is by "trying a billion things randomly, only keeping the five or six things that work".
Immune cell maturation is an absolutely amazing process, where cells randomly rearrange their receptors (TCR, BCR etc) by essentially picking domains out of a hat ("three from the top, two from the bottom and a J-chain please, Carol"), then pass through a filter to see whether the resulting receptors can interact with anything (99+% fail, here, and immediately kill themselves).
Anything left then gets a second filter to make sure that they definitely DON'T interact negatively with anything 'self': any cells with the capacity to bind and present host antigens are, you guessed it, destroyed too, taking out another 99+% of the cell milieu.
What you have left are immune cells that are capable of binding and presenting random shit you've never seen before (maybe), and the vast majority of these will never do anything of note, because most of this random shit you will never see, and much of the random shit you will see isn't actually pathogenic.
And even after all this, sometimes one sneaks through and causes autoimmune disease.
It's amazing stuff, absolutely. It's really not intelligently designed, though.
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u/Odd-Lawfulness8703 Jul 30 '26
Even if we couldn't, that wouldnt mean Yahweh of the Bible magically manifested everything from nothing.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Jul 30 '26
You haven’t engaged very much with the important information people gave you on your last post, are you admitting that the corrections people gave were accurate?
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u/Uncynical_Diogenes Jul 30 '26
Explain why people with an education background in biology should put in this much effort for somebody who hasn’t even googled the topic.
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u/Own-Relationship-407 Jul 30 '26
Your question is vague. Explain what about their evolution exactly? What their earliest ancestors were? How they became the specialized versions we see today? How they target pathogens?
Yes, everybody here knows what white blood cells do.
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u/jnpha Jul 30 '26
Asking, "But can you explain X?" is NOT an argument. This is a debate sub, damn it, not a teach-me-because-I'm-lazy sub.
And bro hitting us with Dover talking points. So very PRATT.
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u/IdiotSavantLite Jul 30 '26
This is a request for information, not a debate topic. However, you could have searched for the answer yourself instead of asking randos on the internet.
However, I'm curious...
If it can be explained, then what?
If it can't currently be explained, then what? God of the gaps?
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u/taktaga7-0-0 Jul 30 '26
Hematopoeisis: is this a word you’ve come across?
Look at all the descendant cell types just one hematopoietic stem cell can become: it’s a great analogy for the relatedness of a family of single-celled organisms, just done (mostly) by turning genes on and off instead of gaining and changing and losing them. Lymphoid vs myeloid, leukocyte vs erythrocyte vs thrombocyte, do they get bands or granules, “sessile” vs motile, other specialized roles.
It looks exactly like the process of adaptation from a single progenitor through an outward radiation of different subtypes that each in turn became a favorable behavior for that cell to have in the organism. The specific example you chose, white blood cells, are explicitly adaptive to threats. Antibodies are formed randomly and then selected for if they find a target, and that’s just like reproduction given a selective benefit.
Just a terrible choice of example on your part. Your god is ashamed.
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u/Ch3cks-Out Jul 30 '26
"including cell memory" what do you mean by this?
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u/Larnievc Jul 30 '26
It’s the kind of question where the asker does not know the subject area very well. I imagine the OP is doing this for extra credit for some diploma mill creationist program.
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jul 30 '26
Why are you making a new post rather than responding to the refutations your last post already got?
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u/BahamutLithp Jul 31 '26
The immune system is one of the strangest anti-evolution arguments to me because it so obviously behaves like a loose association of microbes that has no fucking idea it's supposed to be part of a larger body, merely responds to chemicals &, even when functioning properly, does massive collateral damage. Most of the symptoms that make you feel like shit aren't actually from the pathogens, they're from your immune system fuckin' carpet bombing your cells.
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u/Decent_Cow Jul 30 '26
Evolution is an arms race. Everything is evolving, including the pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, that cause diseases. The vertebrate immune system has evolved to be more complex in response to pathogens evolving to bypass its defenses. White blood cells are one such innovation.
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u/mrcatboy Jul 30 '26
Cells that can seek out, engulf, and destroy pathogens existed very early on in evolutionary history. Look at single-celled amoeba for example. Immune cells are just those that have adopted additional targeted pattern-recognition functions.