We saw how Canguilhem identified trends in the development of the life sciences towards concepts of non-life, and in Haraway's writings on the cyborg the movement towards information-based conceptions of organic function (the move from ‘organism’ to ‘code’). The potential effects of these alternative modes of thinking animal life are twofold. On the one hand, animality becomes ever more subject or definable in terms that are essentially alien to a concept of life, facilitating our reduction of the lives of animals to mere mechanisms or instruments for our use. On the other hand, our understanding of the evolution of animal species points to the many and complex layers of kinship and symbiosis that have evolved across species lines, and the varied relationships that human beings form with other animals at an individual level require alternative expressions of the nature of relation itself. It is not enough to define human-animal interactions in terms of human psychology or moral categories if the very boundary between human and animal is continually shifting under the terms of the fast-developing life sciences.

This chapter, then, has several interrelated aims, the first of which is to continue to trace the reversals and reconfigurations of the hierarchy of the mechanical over the organic. In the writings of Whitehead, this will also involve a renewal of our thinking of relation in a reinscribed ‘order of nature’ built on original processes of ‘unification’ (organisms) rather than substances. Whitehead's thought, based on prehensive unification, which opens up many levels of description of the possible relations in which we are implicated, is intended to serve as a preface to Haraway's critique (and defence) of the sciences, and her analyses of the nature of human and animal interactions with science and technology. Through Stuart Kauffman's work, the aim is to promote a consideration of the specificity and irreducibility of biological processes, from the point of view of contemporary complexity theory as a modern acknowledgment of the limitations of evolutionary theories based purely on principles derived from physical laws, in common with Whitehead's criticisms of scientific method as overly reductive, which he sets out in Science and the Modern World.