The five-fold difference between God, living and non-living beings is an eternal fact

...each living creature is said to be alive and to be the same individual — as for example someone is said to be the same person from when he is a child until he comes to be an old man. And yet, if he's called the same, that's despite the fact that he's never made up from the same things, but is always being renewed, and losing what he had before, whether it's hair, or flesh, or bones, or blood, in fact the whole body. And don't suppose that this is just true in the case of the body; in the case of the soul, too, its traits, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears — none of these things is ever the same in any individual, but some are coming into existence, others passing away.

Organisms possess extraordinary attributes, properties that distinguish them from other collections of matter. What are these distinguishing features of living organisms?

The inanimate is the fundamental of things, the substratum upon which the possibilities rear themselves. Before life was, it was, and it will be when life's last inertia is spent. Out of its mysterious parts the life process came, and upon its hard herbage and by the grace of its scanty tolerances it survives. The inanimate is the mighty trellis about whose inhospitable parts the tendrils of sentiency creep. It is the riddle, the catastrophe, and the sine qua non of the enterprise of consciousness. The inanimate is and has always been indifferent to life, and for this reason it has been indefatigable in its selections. It has no ears for distress, no eyes for injustice, and no sympathy for the unsophisticated. Its hardships, of food, climate, and cataclysm have entered with tireless energy into the destinies of the consciousnesses. It must have been some unprecedented scarcity of nutrition that originated that coarse and fearful manifestation of egoism, carnivorousness.

All inanimate objects are different from Him and from each other and from all living objects.

The inanimate universe is related to the animate as means to end. We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end.

Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of — stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper — won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

No species remains constant: that great renovator of matter
Nature, endlessly fashions new forms from old: there’s nothing in the whole universe that perishes, believe me; rather it renews and varies its substance. What we describe as birth is no more than incipient change from a prior state, while dying
is merely to quit it. Though the parts may be transported hither and thither, the sum of all matter is constant.

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

For decades, biology has been dominated by information—the power of genes. ...[Y]et there is no difference in the information content of a living protozoon and one that died ...The difference between alive and dead lies in energy flow ...the ability of cells to continually regenerate themselves from simpler building blocks.

I speak as a biologist. There aren't many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.

Living things are those things which replicate, adapt, and locally reverse entropy.

Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.