When it comes to bringing something into being, we must consider the form of the thing as well as whatever matter the thing is made of. Consider a tree.
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Of course, science has names for trees, categorizing trees first as Dendrology, woody plants, into genera and we are supposed to identify some feature of the tree such as pine cones or something. Can you see the leaf pattern, or details of the trunk in our tree above? Perhaps an arborist can identify the tree to some degree by the shape of its canopy. I would hazard a guess it is an Oak of some sort.
What we can do is be certain the tree does appear to have some sort of woody trunk and branches. We can also say that the tree does differ from the grass there in that it is woody. So, being woody is the only difference between trees and all other living things. In philosophy, we would call that the species of the living thing we are talking about - that it is woody, it contains wood matter. It also has form, roots underneath, a trunk with branches. So we can be certain that a woody thing with roots, a trunk, and branches is in fact a tree.
Richard Dawkins would like us to believe that living things come from a complex wooden spaceship as early as page five of his book. Aristotle had a similar contemporary that attempted to use the same logic as recorded in his Physics at 193b 18:
An organism comes about by another organism, but not a spaceship from a spaceship. On this account they say that not the shape but the wood is the nature, since if it were to sprout, it would become not a spaceship but wood…the growing thing does proceed from something into something. What then is it that grows? Not the from-which, but the to-which. Therefore, nature is the form.
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