Geological Evolution is Linked to Biological Eveolution

At Carnegie Institute Robert Hazen has been working on the unique mineralogy of the planet Earth for more than a decade.  Hazen says that minerals follow the same kind of frequency of distribution as words in a book. For example, the most-used words in a book are extremely common such as ‘and,’ ‘the,’ and ‘a.’ Rare words define the diversity of a book’s vocabulary. The same is true for minerals on Earth, Hazen says.

Hazen also feels that the vast diversity of minerals found on Earth is because of the vast diversity of biological activity that living things perform on Earth. Hazen’s team applied the biological concepts of chance and necessity to mineral evolution and found that