Human Adaptation to Disease

I've recently been interviewing for grad school, and at one of the institutions I visited, I had a very interesting conversation with a faculty member. We were talking about the evolution of disease in the face of all sorts of selection pressures: drugs, immune responses, other microbes, etc. During the conversation, we turned to talking about coevolution, and this faculty member brought up the point that it seems that the selection pressures involved in the "arms race" between a human host and a disease is fairly one-sided, i.e., our immune system forces our pathogens to adapt (in the evolutionary sense), but most of our immune system "adaptation" happens only at the somatic (physiological) level. By this, I mean that vertebrates have evolved an immune system that has the ability to generate countless numbers of antibodies and the like simply by rearranging and splicing genes within the immune cells. So, any immunity acquired by an individual is not passed along to his/her offspring, and the offspring much start as a completely naive host.So, my hopefully discussion sparking questions are: Do you think that this is a generally accurate statement? And in terms of human (or more correctly-vertebrate) and pathogen interaction, do you think that we have evolved an adaptation that actually prevents any further evolutionary adaptation to disease?

True, we have some developed some recent adaptations to resist diseases. The example of the sickle-cell gene which confers resistance to malaria is the example that comes to my mind. Of course, this is a mutation that affects the red blood cells and the malaria parasite's ability to invade them. Do you know if aids immunity is caused by a mutation in the adaptive immune system, or to some other system or cells? Granted, either way this is adaptation to disease. I suppose I should have been more specific is asking whether or not it would be capable for the adaptive immune system to evolve resistance to disease. Your point about the possibility of Lamarckian evolution is intriguing and has some very interesting implications, especially immunity. However, I have a hard time imagining that this kind of thing would happen with enough frequency to be a significant mechanism for evolution. Though, if we could find a way to induce it ourselves, that would be pretty fantastic.

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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

They may pass on some, but passing antibodies doesn't confer life-long immunity because the infant would not have memory B-cells making those antibodies. So they would confer some immunity until the antibodies passed by the mother have either degraded or bound to a pathogen and are all gone. In order to gain any real immunity, the offspring must have naive B-cells exposed to a pathogen in order for them to differentiate into memory B-cells that would then be ready the next time the pathogen invades to pump out more antibodies.

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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Yes, passing on antigens would do, that would effectively be giving the infant a vaccine, but don't think that that actually happens. That would be pretty cool if it did.

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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."