And it's a well-known aphorism that "in carefully controlled conditions ... the experimental animal will do as it damn well pleases". And yes; it becomes more difficult to reason about the trajectory of that chicken when its internal motivations and factors like hunger, tiredness etc. are opaque to us. And I think that's directly analogous -- DNA and the processes of life have programmed and reprogrammed matter, and does make reasoning about them harder.
And it highlights the importance of metaphorically aseptic technique in the analysis of malware and computer interaction; and in doing so highlights the problems of "laboratory conditions" being distinct from real world ones since malware might detect the abnormal sterility...
(I'm not even sure whether I'm agreeing with you or disagreeing. But your post was thoughtprovoking.)