Could natural selection of gametes within the parents bodies cause speciation?
The recent post about mass-cell mutation by nanobots etc helped me to expand an idea about speciation when I misread “mass-cell” as “mast cell”. Originally, my idea involved only the natural selection of gametes within the parents’ bodies due to external environmental factors as causing speciation, but it left a lot of unanswered questions about how we recognize other indivduals as belonging to the same species, especially for the purposes of reproduction. This new idea involves changes in the immune system. I think that two systems, the reproductive system, and the immune system, emerge from the same cell line and are also related functionally in that they both have immortal cell lines, that is, they continuously produce new cells: gametes and immune cells. Furthermore, cooperation between the gametes and the immune system must exist so that the gametes do not suffer immune challenge (ie, attack by the immune system). Consider this scenario where a mutation in the immune system would
