Minerals evolve under pressure in the same way life does, researchers find

Last year, scientists proposed that all complex systems in the universe evolve in a similar way to life — including stars, planets and Technology. Now, researchers claim they've found evidence of this unifying law in minerals. 

The new study is a proof of concept for the recently proposed "missing law" that explains why so many complex systems appear to become more complex over time. This law of increasing functional information, presented in October 2023, expanded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to include non-living systems.   

The researchers behind the new study demonstrated that, just like life, minerals consistently become more complex over time when subject to selection pressures. They published their findings in the July volume of the journal PNAS Nexus.

"Ultimately, we hope this work contributes to developing a theory that unifies how all complex systems, both living and nonliving, evolve over time," study co-author Michael Wong, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Science research institute in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. "A result that we believe would be transformative to Science."

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The law of increasing functional information states that "the functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions."  

If the proposed law is correct, then minerals and other complex systems should become more complex and display an increase in functional information under continued selection pressures. This functional information is the number of configurations in a system that can perform a particular function, according to the study. In this case, the configurations are the minerals and the function is stability over time or static persistence, so the complexity is measured by the number of stable minerals.