Let us play a little game. What do clocks and cats have in common? For starters, both transform energy from an input source (batteries for clocks and food for cats) using a chemical process to do work. I would have said “useful work”, but that honor belongs exclusively to clocks.
Going from function to form, both clocks and cats share compositional chemical elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc. At a finer level, both are made of electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.
Even with so much similarity at the micro-level, we note that cats are living beings while clocks are not. Why is this?