 While the standing of the immune self has remained contentious, epistemological ambiguity and flexible polysemy has proven effective in sustaining the term’s powerful heuristic value as an idiom with many uses and meanings (Crist and Tauber 2000). Its versatility and pragmatic utility have effectively integrated clinical immune phenomena by highlighting the essential similarity or interconnectedness of diverse immune-mediated processes in response to various clinical challenges. Thus nutrition, allergy, infection, autoimmune disease, various phenomena of tolerance, natural or experimentally created chimeras (transplantation), and autoimmunity all become conceived as a network of interlinked or interrelated functions subject to evolutionary transformation and adaption. As these topics mirror and play off one another under the rubric of selfhood, immunologists have a ready means by which to represent states or processes that arise in the various interactions between the organism and its environment at different evolutionary stages and development.