The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariable conditioned by the assumption that fleshy bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms  of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.