Gino Segrè is a physicist fascinated with the concept of temperature, to the point where he’s written a history of it, entitled A Matter of Degrees. It’s interesting, and here’s one of the better parts encountered so far. All typos are mine.
But there is some evidence that fever enhances the functioning of the immune system; white blood cells, the system’s agents, move more rapidly as temperature approaches 104 degrees, but that’s only one of the possible reasons for the evolution of the fever response. P. A. Mackowiak has suggest that fever sometimes plays a protective role: a mild infection heals rapidly with perhaps a slight enhancement of the immune system, but a raging high fever that leads to a rapid death of the afflicted individual helps limit the spread to the individual’s kin of a violent contagious infection.
Hmmmmmmmm! Biological evolution applies to populations; individuals are merely the constituents of the populations, not the epitome.
