 Apart from elucidating issues pertaining to identity, individuality and agency of an organism in its broader ecological and evolutionary history, philosophy of immunology also contributes to discussions about the origin, organization, and methods of biological knowledge. Reflecting on explanatory practices of immunology, the epistemic modality has an important practical dimension that contributes to developing methodological strategies and conceptual tools to handle the complexity of the immune system. Genomic, proteomic and transcriptomic studies are producing vast amounts of immune data with little understanding of the basic organization and regulation that must integrate systems-level and molecular-level approaches (Ohno 1990; Schatz and Langmead 2013; see the entry on  genomics and postgenomics).