The mindblowing way rocks “survive” and evolve | Robert Hazen

• A colleague asked me, "Was Mineral 'X' around at time 'Y' in Earth history?" He's putting a time axis on mineralogy, and this led to the idea of mineral evolution, where you start with just a few dozen minerals that form planets in the earliest stage of our solar system, to a hundred minerals, then 300 minerals, then 800 minerals, and 3,000 minerals. And then life comes along, and it makes another 3,000 minerals—that's evolution. An increase in diversity, an increase in patterning, and increase in complexity. All of the same characteristics that we see in the origin and evolution of life, and indeed it's co-evolving 'cause minerals helped trigger life, but then life helps trigger minerals.

So the co-evolution of all these systems, and not just minerals in life, but oceans and atmospheres, and the way planets work and technology and the arts and language and all sorts of other domains. When the idea of mineral evolution first hit me, I said, "Gee, there's a connection here between living and non-living systems." We claim this is true because all of these systems, all these evolving systems, are conceptually equivalent in three absolutely critical ways.

First, you have lots of interacting components. They could be atoms and molecules; they could be cells or genes. They could be musical notes or words on a page or even computer code—and those different systems can be arranged in combinatorially huge numbers of ways, vast potential configuration space. Now, the second thing is you have to have some way to generate a bunch of those configurations, either Earth mixing up atoms and molecules, or life generating new combinations of genes, or composers creating new arrangements of notes on a page.

And then number three, there has to be a mechanism for selection. Now, what do you select for? Darwin said, "It's survival of the fittest. It's passing your genes onto the next generation," and that's true for life, but in minerals, it's being stable. It means you don't melt, you don't dissolve, you don't weather away. In the case of music, it means that people buy your records. Of every million songs that's written, maybe only a handful become, you know, number one hits on the charts. That's because of a selection mechanism.

So this is a continuum of co-evolving, integrated systems. It's not just life; it's the whole shebang. The whole thing is evolving, and we still are part of that incredible, inspiring evolution of our cosmos.