 The environmental perspective not only refers to the application of ecological and evolutionary knowledge to immune modeling, but also includes lessons learned from studies of immunity that reciprocally inform current understanding of evolution. How these findings shed light on the character of evolutionary change is well illustrated by the research of inheritable immune variation. The origin of variation has been subject to much debate in philosophy of biology. Advocates of the view that nonrandom, environmentally induced factors are involved in the generation of inheritable variation cite evidence of stress-induced mutagenesis, horizontal gene transfer, and non-genetic systems of inheritance (Koonin 2012: 257–291). Such discoveries suggest that organisms may enhance their own adaptation to altered environmental conditions epigenetically (Jablonka and Lamb 2014; J. Shapiro 2011). Specialized diversification and recombination mechanisms that are used by organisms to enhance their own adaptation are considered Lamarckian in so far as the response to specific environmental cues leads to alterations of phenotypic features, and these adaptive characteristics may be transmitted to succeeding generations (Sarkar 1991; Depew and Weber 1996). Notwithstanding evidence for such mechanisms, postulated non-random mechanisms of evolution have been disputed by those who claim that appeals to Lamarckism are misguided and stem from mis-interpreting the Neo-Darwinian synthesis or from overlooking genes as the basic units of selection (Merlin 2010; Weiss 2015). With a focus on rapidly adapting and evolving cell populations, immunological studies provide a unique opportunity to investigate evolution in real time and to understand the role of non-random, inheritable alterations of the phenotype.