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, 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
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.

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

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