We once thought there was a big difference between a rock and a worm because one is living and the other is not. Though our view of worms has pretty much remained the same, our view of rocks is rapidly changing from that of stagnant, inert matter to something much closer to life itself. Though rocks do not have DNA or reproduce, we are finding that they are anything but still or motionless. With new understandings of what matter is actually like at a quantum level, the gap between living and non-living matter has closed immensely.
We used to think there was an evolutionary moment when some unexplained event such as lighting hitting a pond suddenly turned inert matter into a living organism. But the jump from inert matter to a living organism actually occurred in millions of steps over billions of years. The idea that some sort of intervention was required to make such a big leap has fallen by the wayside with new understandings of how life actually evolved.
