Are non-living things… evolving? Yes, says leading mineralogist

The colleague asked me, was mineral X around at time Y in Earth history

It's putting a time axis on mineralogy. And this led to the idea of mineral evolution

Mineral evolution, where you start with just a few dozen minerals that form planets

in the earliest stage of our solar system to 100 minerals, then 300 minerals, then 800 minerals

then 800 minerals, and then life comes along and it makes another 3,000 minerals

That's evolution, an increase in diversity, an increase in patterning, an increase in complexity

All of the same characteristics that we see in the origin and evolution of life, and indeed it's co-evolving

because 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 in technology and the arts and language and all sorts of other domains

So evolution is the concept that applies to living and non-living systems

When the idea of mineral evolution first hit me, I said, gee, there's a connection here between living

and non-living systems. And 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 on to 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 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