What Makes Clocks And Cats Different?

Exploring the fundamentals of life!

Clock vs. Cat — Illustrative art created by the author

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?

What differentiates living beings from non-living things?

This is the question that I will be exploring in this essay.

Physics Vs. Biology

Physics and biology might both be branches of science, but they take fundamentally different approaches to the same question.

As far as biologists are concerned, life emerges from systems that perform self-sustaining functions such as ingestion, digestion, excretion, and most importantly, the self-replicating function of reproduction. We could call this the emergent approach.