This is not true. Your extracelluar matrix is vital for your survival, as well as the gases dissolved into it and in your lungs. Your bones, while they have stem cells inside and have osteoblasts scattered throughout an extra cellular material. Do the cells build all this? Yes, but not everything inside of you is strictly speaking made of cells.
I didn't speak incorrectly. You didn't understand my point and apparently not the GP's either. Diving into the construction of the human body isn't relevant to a discussion on design philosophy weighing homogeneous vs. heterogenous constructs.
"But the body isn't homogeneous! It's just mostly homogenous" is a splitting hair argument even if I'd believed you'd kept the plot.
It is not mostly just homogenous as previously described. It is a hefty mix of cells and extra cellular material, or are you going to argue that hair is made of cells too and that distinguishing between alive and dead cells is splitting hairs?
The fact that you even acknowledge it is splitting hairs indicates that you are aware that your analogy is flawed as you can't really think of the body as just cells and that is in direct contrast to systems we discuss in which everything, not mostly, are a certain way. Your body is not mostly cells in the strictest of senses. It is lot of non living material that is a mix or organically made structures as well as various gases, liquids and solids.
I'm not making the analogy; I'm pointing to how GP's analogy fails to demonstrate their point.
But yeah, the analogy isn't perfect. And the academic nature of the metaphor's subject was obviously going to invite some rube to point out how it's not 100% spot on and how that's well worth talking about.
You're just arguing my greater point anyway: Your chosen level of perspective with these metaphors (and real issues) will invert the design philosophy. At one level, everything is different and using different means for the same goal, at another level, everything is the same and using the same means for different goals. If it's not organs, then its cells, then its "extracellular material and are dead cells different from live cells!?", then its atoms and then quarks.
But please, go ahead and educate me on how atoms aren't all the same and how that too is a critical point to be made in this conversation.
I feel like this is downvoted so harshly with only a single reply at this writing because there was some sentimental value to grandparent's post, but their analogy was fundamentally broken when they started talking about the design of human life from the high-level perspective of Aristotle's definition of a living thing as "being-at-work-being-itself", essentially.
More importantly, the perceived conceptual integrity of the human body is rather philosophical was put to question by Roger Penrose in his JRE episode where he talks about why the distribution of motor functions makes no sense ("the foot and walking are over here", "running is all the way over there", to paraphrase) all and we likely need a new physics model to explain consciousness as it arises in the physical brain.
Biology moved on from such an Aristotelian perspective for good reason, to slightly alter something Spinoza once said, we don't know what a cell can do. Our physical being is a radical aggregate that we don't even fully understand yet.