What Is Life? On Symbiosis, Technology, and the Strange Organisms We Have Become

We often talk about life as if it were a fixed and recognizable biological fact. A cell, a genome, an organism, a species. We picture inheritance as a clean line, evolution as a slow march of bodies and traits, and development as the unfolding of an internal program. But what if none of this is quite right? What if life is less a machine following instructions, and more a shifting mesh of relationships, exchanges, and borrowed organs? What if our bodies are not where life begins or ends, but only one layer in a larger technical ecology?

A familiar phrase often opens the discussion: “A biological cell is a sequence of instructions.” It is the language of genetics, coding, blueprint, program. This metaphor defined the second half of the twentieth century, and it still shapes how we imagine ourselves. Yet everything we know about living systems suggests the opposite. A genome does not determine a form. It participates in a field of reactions and constraints, a world of nutrients, stress, temperature, symbionts, and chemical flows. A plant with the same DNA grows differently in two nearby environments. Proteins fold or misfold depending on the cell’s metabolic state. Development is less reading a script and more navigating a storm. Life does not run on instructions. It runs on interactions.

If genes were truly programs, evolution would be predictable. Instead, even reproduction carries a strange, unruly excess. Life repeats itself, but never quite the same way. Bernard Stiegler once remarked that within the supposedly automatic cycle of reproduction, deviations emerge that cannot be reduced to the form that generated them. Mutations appear, cells misbehave, organisms veer off course. This is not error. It is the engine of novelty. It is what allows life to invent new strategies, new ways of resisting the universal pull of entropy.

And entropy matters here, because one of the deepest shifts in modern thought arrived not from philosophy but from physics. The universe tends toward disorder. Things fall apart. Signals degrade. Yet every living organism pushes back against that tide. It sorts flows of energy, matter, and information into coherent patterns. Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen described all organisms as “Maxwellian demons,” tiny agents that sift low-entropy energy into usable forms. A lion metabolizes a gazelle. A bacterium oxidizes iron. A tree captures sunlight and holds it briefly in the fragile lattice of sugar. Every organism is a temporary victory against the drift toward chaos.

But humans are a different kind of demon. We are not content with the organs we are born with. Long before recorded history, we began inventing new organs outside our bodies. A stone blade is a prosthetic tooth. A pot is a prosthetic stomach. Writing is a prosthetic memory. Electricity is a prosthetic metabolism. Alfred Lotka called these inventions “exosomatic instruments,” and he suggested that human evolution diverged radically from the biological path when we began externalizing our survival functions into tools and machines. Unlike birds or wolves or insects, whose organs are given at birth, we build ours. Our evolution is not anatomical. It is technical.

Instead of waiting for generations of selective pressure to reshape bone and muscle, we adapt through rapid cycles of tool-making. We alter the world more quickly than the world alters us. Lotka described this shift as a new kind of orthogenesis, not the discredited Victorian idea of evolution driven by a mystical inner direction, but the observable fact that human technical systems accumulate in patterned ways. They extend our reach, reorganize our environments, and loop back to transform our behavior. Technology evolves faster than biology ever could, and we evolve with it.

This blurring of boundaries between organism and artifact, between biological and technical, leads to a strange but powerful idea: life is always already prosthetic. The natural world is full of organisms that survive by distributing their functions across others. Consider the lichen. It is not a plant, not a fungus, and not an alga. It is a partnership that becomes a third thing. The alga captures light; the fungus provides structure and moisture. Each gives the other an organ it lacks. Together they create an organism neither could have become alone. Symbiosis, in this view, is not cooperation. It is engineering.

A lichen: life distributing its functions across two bodies to create one organism

This “prosthetic symbiosis” occurs when one life form effectively externalizes one of its functions into another. It is not that the fungus uses the alga as a tool, or that the alga rides along for convenience. It is that they split their functions across bodies in order to make something more resilient. A fungal greenhouse, an algal solar panel. Two partial lives that become one improbable architecture.

Our world is full of such architectures. Some live in termite guts, where thousands of bacteria propel a single protozoan in synchronized waves. Others live in our own intestines, digesting food we could never digest alone. Still others float in the oceans as vast consortia of microbes exchanging nutrients, genes, and signaling molecules. These systems are not individuals. They are never one species or one genome. They are technical assemblages, processes rather than entities.

What these examples show, again and again, is that life does not develop by isolation. It develops by entanglement. By outsourcing. By borrowing. By inventing. The boundary between inside and outside, self and tool, organism and environment, is not a wall but a membrane. A site of exchange.

This brings us back to us. If symbiosis is a kind of technicity, and if human technicity is a kind of symbiosis with our own artifacts, then perhaps the line between biology and technology was always thinner than we imagined. The human species may be the only one whose “organs” include satellites, libraries, electricity grids, smartphones, and computational models. Yet this is only an extension of patterns already present in lichens and termites. Life evolves by scattering its functions across the world and then weaving them back into new forms.

To ask what life is today is to ask how it organizes itself against entropy, how it distributes its functions, how it invents new ways of persisting. Genes matter, but only as part of a broader diagram of flows, feedbacks, and alliances. Organisms matter, but only as temporary nodes in a much larger field of processes. Evolution matters, but it now unfolds as much in the domain of tools and infrastructures as in the domain of cells.

We are not separate from our technologies. We are continuous with them. We are lichens made of flesh and silicon, fungi and language, algae and electricity. To live now is to inhabit an expanding ecology of external organs, to negotiate feedback loops that exceed our bodies, and to confront the ethical question that shadows all technical life. What kinds of beings do we become when our evolution is no longer biological but prosthetic? And how do we learn to live in a world where every organism is assembled from the functions of others?