Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals | Quanta Magazine
Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals | Quanta Magazine
A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too.
I know this sub is about biodiversity but that is the mindblowing thing, the incredible diversity of minerals on earth (and my oh my the diversity is overwhelming) is a consequence of the incredible biodiversity of life, and it is not unlikely that it worked the other way too, a diversity of minerals may have been a formative part of the development of life.
A diversity of minerals/chemical may have facilitated the formation and diversification of life which fed back into the further diversification of minerals...
It suggests a beautiful perspective to understand ecosystems and the essential role of diversity for stability.
I agree completely! When i teach the concept of Biodiversity to my classes it quickly spirals to other topics. Everything is related.
I really like some of Christopher Alexander (the architect) big ideas on the topic. He doesn't really capture them in a way that is rigorous or quite how a scientist would frame things but I think his idea of life being being a property of the arrangement of things in space that can be either more or less depending on the pattern of that arrangement is actually a pretty deep idea.
He lists a series of architectural patterns found in architecture that feels alive such as imperfect repetition, detail at different scales, deep interlock between adjacent regions (not a simple binary border etc...), and they are described as an artist would in vague ways but I while that can be infuriating from the standpoint of a scientist I also think it is interesting to ponder precisely because he isn't really pretending to know the answer, he knows he is an architect attempting to crudely gesture at science and I kind of find it fascinating.
What is the architecture of life? Not the engineering, not how each part of the nuts and bolts of life work... but rather given the same identical set of starting elements, what arrangement of them creates the most fertile environment for new systems to arise? What is the shape and form of living systems? You can see one example of it in the shapes mold makes to spread across petri dishes and how it mirrors the patterns of how cities grow, but I think a rigorous and precise language to describe diversity and the "aliveness" of something or at least the fertileness for something alive to spontaneously form is possible...
sorry for the rant lol
Christopher Alexander is brilliant. Regularly return to A Pattern Language, so much inspiration.