From modern evolutionary biology's perspective "individual organisms" are NOT the "basic units/modules etc." of life. The basic ones are genes at the core infor

From modern evolutionary biology's perspective "individual organisms" are NOT the "basic units/modules etc." of life. The basic ones are genes at the core informational level level and species at more loose and macro level. So the living things to software analogy would be more like: - gene == source code of a program's module (like an "independently testable unit of code" - natural-selection + sex-based recombination are actually the tests) - ... (organizational levels with with no direct analogy to software go in between) - individual organism == set of processes (running instances of programs) running together with heavy inter-process communication Then at a higher level, genes and their manifestations constitute the "hardware" (more like a VM), run the software called "memes", with its own organizational patterns that are outside the field of biology. What you call living thing or individual organism is, from "life's perspective", closer to a transient group of running processes that can be killed at any time because their sources and binaries are safely stored as genes or memes. Your body and your psychological self are closer to "running threads of nginx on a particular server handling a particular set of requests" than to "the program nginx itself" in source or binary form :)