[yubblegum]

> "Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."

The results presented to the scientific community of the island was that the "mechanisms" are "thinking machines". They clearly did not think the boxes to be 'living creatures'.

[squidbeak]

Quite. But for the purposes of his story, their narrator is applying them as an analogue to processes in living creatures.