“Self-organizing Systems Biologists have long given up the idea that living organisms are just like machines. Medical practitioners today recognize the ineffectiveness of treating the human body as a separate mechanism. They speak about holistic healing, treating the whole person, and including the person’s social and physical environment. Today living organisms are described as self-regulating systems. They organize themselves, nourish themselves, heal themselves, propagate themselves, protect themselves, and interact creatively with other systems. We used to call this instinct—in animals if not in plants. Today we talk about genes that have coded messages or instructions that connect with one another in a DNA spiral in the nucleus of every living cell. If we were to write out the instructions contained in any one tiny DNA spiral we would fill about a thousand books of six hundred pages each.”