[itistoday]

That period stretched from a few centuries ago (Newtonian mechanics) to the first half of the 20th century. Now, I think, we're heading toward the understanding that "intricate biological machine" might not be the best of models, and that "blob of living matter" is worth revisiting.

The notion of world-as-machine is becoming dated I think, as a more organic understanding arises, both from the mixing of western and eastern ideas, as well as better physics.

[jerf]

Also, I'd observe that our machines have become more complicated. The complexity of the first car is nothing whatsoever next to the complexity of your cell phone. The more complicated our machines get, the more organic their behavior has been getting quite naturally. (Indeed, one of the most important things about building large systems is learning how to write code that works less "organically", lest the problems that organic machines tend to have overwhelm you, things like errant state propagation and such that cause weird, weird bugs five minutes after the trigger.)