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A herd […] is always on alert; at almost every moment some eyes, ears and noses will command all approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a signal sign to all its companies.

Over the past century, various developments have resulted in a set of body ontologies that are not based on the familiar anatomical-physiological ontology of the modern body, but quite explicitly construe the body in terms of flows of information and communication patterns. The endocrinological body, originating in the early twentieth century, for instance, knows the body as a biochemical entity, with an ontology of chemical substances that are characterised in terms of messages, signals, and feedback loops. Later, immunology construed a body that differed significantly from the anatomical body in its construction of body boundaries - the boundary between self and other - as the result of a fight going on beneath the skin. The sciences and practices of genetics, finally have generated a body ontology that takes the building blocks of the body to be “information”: the human genome and DNA itself are codes to be broken in order to enable us to “read” the “blueprints of life.” The “stuff” of genetics is information - no matter how this stuff can be described in biochemical terms of proteins, its “essence” lies in its coding function.