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Mineral Evolution: The Word

“Mineral evolution” names the growth of a planet’s mineral diversity through time, from the dozen or so minerals of the early solar system to the thousands found on Earth today, a history in which life has taken part. The framework and its ten stages are set out under Mineral evolution (the subject).

The authors’ comment

Robert Hazen and his colleagues addressed the word in the paper that proposed the framework (“Mineral Evolution”, American Mineralogist, 2008). “The use of the term ‘evolution’ in the context of mineralogy may strike some readers as odd, perhaps even inappropriate”, they wrote, citing Norman Bowen’s The Evolution of the Igneous Rocks (1928) as a geological precedent. At the most basic level evolution is “change over time”, and mineral evolution implies something more: “a sequence of deterministic, irreversible processes” leading to “progressively more diverse and complex phase assemblages”, which they placed as “a fascinating specific example of the more general process of cosmic evolution”. It is not Darwinian: “minerals do not mutate or compete for geochemical niches in the biological sense, nor do they pass information to progeny through a genetic mechanism. For example, quartz does not out-compete olivine for crystallization from granite magma.”

The objections

The word was objected to at once, by the geologist Minik Rosing in a commentary in Nature (“On the Evolution of Minerals”, 2008) and by the palaeontologist Niles Eldredge (2009).

The general sense

Hazen and Eldredge answered together in 2010 (“Themes and Variations in Complex Systems”, Elements): acknowledging the objections, they wrote that the term applies to such systems only in the most general sense of “change over time”, or perhaps “change with diversification over time”.

Selection widened

In 2023 Michael Wong, Hazen and colleagues proposed a law (“On the Roles of Function and Selection in Evolving Systems”, PNAS): in any system of many components that can combine into vast numbers of configurations, some of which persist because of their function, functional information increases over time. Selection here includes the mere persistence of stable configurations, so that minerals, stars and living things fall under one law, with Darwinian natural selection as one instance. A 2024 study by the same group found functional information rising across the stages of mineral evolution but concluded that “mineral evolution is not open-ended”, unlike life. Robert Root-Bernstein replied in PNAS (2024) that evolution is not driven toward increasing information and complexity.

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See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Mineral evolution (the framework) · Cosmic evolution · Assembly theory · Hazen · Eldredge