Stephen Talbott examines how we talk about organisms:
If a single problem has vexed biologists for the past couple of hundred years, surely it concerns the relation between biology and physics. Many have struggled to show that biology is, in one sense or another, no more than an elaboration of physics, while others have yearned to identify a “something more” that, as a matter of fundamental principle, differentiates a tiger — or an amoeba — from a stone.
… [W]hatever their belief in these matters, biologists today — and molecular biologists in particular — routinely and unavoidably describe the organism in terms that go far beyond the language of physics and chemistry. Words like “stimulus,” “response,” “signal,” “adapt,” “inherit,” and “communicate,” in their biological sense, would never be applied to the strictly physical and chemical processes in a corpse or other inanimate object.
The Dish 