Speaking as a piece of cellular technology, (admittedly a very advanced and well-abstracted one) I'm surprised that you find this hard to believe. Organisms are technologies, and our agendas are technological agendas.

If you take away my supply of fresh water, I will fight to get it back. Why do I want fresh water so badly? Ultimately, it's because of a technology choice, made -- perhaps by accident -- by my distant ancestors. My really distant ancestors. Several billion years ago a replicator (might have been DNA or RNA; might have been some earlier self-replicating structure; nobody really knows) built itself a nifty technology for protecting itself and moving around. The technology -- which eventually evolved into things like cell membranes and organelles -- was designed to work in salty water, where the replicators happened to live (or did they move there, because saltwater-based tech worked so well? Again, we don't know.)

It's been a long time since my ancestors lived primarily in salty water. And yet nearly every component of my body still requires a wet environment, containing a rather precise concentration of specific minerals in solution, in order to survive. Maintaining that environment requires a steady supply of fresh water from the outside world. And so I find that my body is preprogrammed to seek fresh water. This isn't my idea. In theory, I could be happy to live as a disembodied mind, without drinking water. But I'm built out of a specific technology, and that technology has an agenda.

Humans often fail to consciously notice that living things and technologies are aspects of the same thing. We use the word technology only to refer to objects that we don't identify very closely with. (But not, of course, to things that weren't built by living creatures. A star is very complicated, but it is not a technology.) But the word wears off quite quickly. Successful technologies rapidly get adopted into our lives. I would never call my left hand a technology except in an essay such as this. Even to call my cell phone a technology is beginning to seem stilted -- to do so, in my culture, would label me as either a techie or a luddite. And we may have reached the point where, alas, the Internet is no longer a technology to me. It's a significant part of my thinking, and a significant component of my happiness. Cut me off from the web long enough and I will probably react as if you'd stolen my fresh water. (We may soon reach the stage where being disconnected from the net will literally kill you, just as losing your job in the USA can kill you by removing your health insurance at a crucial moment.)

But though I identify more closely with my left hand than with the stainless steel screws in my jaw, and more closely with my metal components than with my contact lenses, and more closely with my contacts than my clothes, and more closely with my clothes than my car, and more closely with my car than my iPod, and more closely with my iPod than with the buggy software I wrote this afternoon which I will probably throw away, what -- really -- is the fundamental difference between any of these things? They're all technological components, created by technologies, in pursuit of technological agendas. Or, phrased differently, they are all artifacts created by living creatures in pursuit of life. Same difference.

Incidentally, I'd like to wish Charles Darwin a happy, belated 200th birthday. And it doesn't surprise me that, so many years after his work, essays like this still strike many people as "utter nonsense", perhaps even evil. The really big ideas take time to soak in.