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Evolving Rocks
SpaceAdmiral notes a new study making the claim that rocks have been evolving throughout Earth's history. "'Mineral evolution is obviously different from Darwinian evolution — minerals don't mutate, reproduce or compete like living organisms,' said Hazen in a statement announcing the study's findings. 'But we found both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically over more than 4.5 billion years of Earth's history. For at least 2.5 billion years, and possibly since the emergence of life, Earth's mineralogy has evolved in parallel with biology,' Hazen added. 'One implication of this finding is that remote observations of the mineralogy of other moons and planets may provide crucial evidence for biological influences beyond Earth.'"
There has to be a Galaxy Quest 'Rock Monster' joke in here somewhere...
(Cue the F4 'Thing' jokes too...)
So the Earth is not, at least, part of a 2nd generation system? With the heavier elements formed during a previous sun's life cycle and explosion?
but not as we know it?
I think Lemmy ate them all! He is Rock!
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
What a misuse of terms.
Our Earth's surface is overwhelmingly shaped by biology - most of the surface carbon, for example (which on Venus is in the atmosphere) is in carbonate rocks, like limestone. There are whole island chains (coral atolls) made biologically. Soil results from biological processes (in fact, I would suspect that soil has evolved over time, as the organisms that make it have evolved). The marble in our public buildings results from biology (and metamorphism).
Could this be used to look for extra-terrestrial life ? Sure. Does this mean that the rocks are evolving ? No.
something to make watching grass grow exciting...
how long until
They turned into Dwayne Johnson
There ain't no monkeys in MY pet rock's family tree!
> But we found both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically
Well, duh. Obviously stuff like that would change over time. The only reason anyone would *ever* assume otherwise is to make radioactive dating sound slightly less preposterous.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
...What a load of Schist.
No its worse than that. They are using "evolved" to mean changed. Its like saying that spring evolves into summer, or a newspaper of paper mache.
It won't be long before the "Intelligent Design" crew start bringing up evolving rocks to show that "evolutionists don't know what they are talking about".
"Dr. Smith, we want you to study this rock."
"OK, what am I looking for?"
"Well, we believe that it's changing."
"Ahhhhh....Right. OK, would you mind passing me some of that good stuff you're smoking? Rather obvious at this point I'm gonna need some too."
One word: Horta.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I read the title as "Roving Ewoks"... That sure got my attention.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
'If something is more likely to survive, it survives more often'. Sounds pretty obvious, but that's what evolution in this sense amounts to. The atom too is so abundant simply because it's a stable structure which survived where other structures did not.
Progressively apply the term more generally and it won't be long before you're saying "Things that are, exist". There's a good reason why we make the distinction where the object is considered living or not. Life is a notable step further wherein the complexity has reached a new scale. Analogy is fine, but sensationalism like this serves only to confuse.
'Mineral evolution is obviously different from Darwinian evolution -- minerals don't mutate, reproduce or compete like living organisms,' said Hazen in a statement announcing the study's findings.
Thereby neatly summarizing why it's idiotic to call this process "evolution".
But, holy shit! Earth's mineral composition changes over time? And here I thought that the obvious hypothesis was that it has remained completely unchanged over the last couple of billion years.
sic transit gloria mundi
The Economist recently had an article about this study as well.
Geodude > Graveler > Golem http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Geodude_(Pok%C3%A9mon) Dr. Brock Takeshi, Pewter City Athletic Association
I wonder, is evolution, really at a fundamental level, the inverse of entropy?
If entropy, as a concept, is the movement from an ordered state to a disordered state then evolution is the concept of moving from a lower ordered state to a higher or more advanced\structured state. (The whole entropy is a measurement issue)
If things can evolve from basic to complex then doesn't that impact the concepts of our universe decaying into a cool nothingness?
Just a passing thought is all...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
This is just a bit of an extension from what I learned in my geochemistry and economic mineralogy courses. So chemical composition changes as some elements are used.. sounds almost as bad as the IBM pay at the table patent...
The one that the ID-ists object to is Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection-- that is, the theory of the mechanism of that change in living beings.
(and, of course, the hardline creationist object to the fact that living beings change over time, since God created them all exactly as they are now. Except for the snakes, which were originally created with legs-- that's a special case. I don't think that they have any particular problem with the idea of rock types changing, though.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
For about 30 minutes this morning they brought the beta Firehose thing live, and made it the default for all users.
The homepage was a stack of one-lined entries for each story, with no summaries. It looked like an RSS feed.
Truly terrible stuff. They changed it back fast, heh.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
EVOLVING!
dictates I must stop saying "dumb as a rock"?
Here's a paper from 2003 that is an excellent read, if you are really interested in a very strong, coherent, and comprehensive hypothesis of the change from geochemistry to biochemistry, that is, abiogenesis:
In a nutshell, it offers a hypothesis of life having evolved in FeS and NiS deposits around ancient deep sea geothermal vents. The nature of such rocks is that they form small compartments which acted as "cell walls" to hold early biomolecules in such concentrations to be able to begin biochemistry. Over time, the biochemistry for lipid synthesis began, at which point eubacteria and archaebacteria diverged as they evolved very different mechanisms for making lipid membranes. This gave rise to the first free life forms, prokaryotic bacteria. It is then further hypothesized that Eukaryotes evolved from archaebacteria involved in a symbiotic relationship which became endosymbiotic with a eubacteria that eventually became mitochondria. And so on and so forth. Read the paper. It lays it all out very well and the hypothesis seems to fit very well with available data, both in the geologic record and the phylogenies of various modern archaebacteria, eubacteria, and eukaryotes.
It is perhaps the most coherent, comprehensive, well-supported treatment of the idea of abiogenesis I have ever read.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
evolve
verb
develop gradually
develop
verb
grow or cause to grow more mature, advanced, or elaborate
If they follow the definition, then they are saying that minerals have become more elaborate over time. Whether that is true and whether it is linked to life could be determined from physical evidence. I won't be surprised if it proves true, but I will be surprised if it hasn't been proposed before.
He is a great example of Mineral Evolution...
-- Simon said: Die!
The sensational band the B-52's already discovered that rocks were evolving back in '78. Just look what they said...
We were at the beach
Everybody had matching towels
Somebody went under a dock
And there they saw a rock
It wasn't a rock
It was a rock lobster
Along the lines of evolution and rock, man didn't evolve from The Monkeys, he evolved from The Beatles!!!
One man with a gun can control 100 without one
Of course the Intelligent Design crowd is going to have a problem with rock's mineral composition changing. Geologic timescales are many orders of magnitude larger than 4500 BC, which is when they believe God created Earth. It can take millions of years for the metamorphic processes to occur. The mineral (homogenous crystaline compounds) composition of rocks is changing through chemical weathering.
First of all, entropy only increases with time in what is called a closed system. Nothing in, nothing out. If I mix water and salt, I increase the entropy (there are more ways the atoms can be arranged, in effect.) But if I am allowed to bring in energy from outside, I can fix this. I could boil the mixture in a flask, asnd condense the steam. Now I have the water and the salt separated again, but only because I fed "high grade" heat energy in, and I removed "low grade" heat energy from the steam. The water and salt have lost entropy, but the heat source and sink show a net gain. Overall, it can be shown that the entropy gained by the heat source alwasy exceeds the entropy lsot by the water/salt solution.
In the same way, life on Earth can use high grade energy from the Sun to reduce entropy locally, but that energy then has to be re-radiated as low grade energy, with a net gain in entropy. (If the energy wasn't re-radiated, the Earth would get hotter and hotter, gaining entropy. There is no fix for this.)
However, there is an additional point. Evolution does NOT mean evolving from a lower to a more organised state. You need to read Jay Gould on this, he explains it very well. But, in a nutshell, suppose that as a result of human or other activity the earth became unsuitable for any life forms other than high temperature sulfur bacteria. Evolution would ensure that bacteria evolved to fill this ecological niche and more complex lifeforms died out. This is the "survival of the fittest", which does not mean "survival of those with the biggest muscles".
Life maintains itself by keeping down its local entropy. It does this by, in effect, causing entropy to increase somewhere else and then getting rid of the high entropy "waste products", ultimately into space.
In doing so, life may cause geological changes by e.g. depositing calcarious skeletons in rivers and seabeds, or changing the atmosphere and rainfall patterns. You could say that some rocks are INVOLVED in the evolutionary process, and to that extent at least the article is correct.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I, for one, welcome our new igneous overlords.
Our Earth's surface is overwhelmingly shaped by biology
In addition to the carbon cycle, the large quantities of oxygen in the atmosphere affect what kind of rocks can exist on the surface.
Competition does not require that living beings are the actors. Nor does cooperation. Therefore evolution can act on nonliving systems.
Competition is this: a state where one pattern continues to exist while another does not due to the better pattern's fitness in a given environment.
Cooperation is this: a state where two patterns reinforce their fitness in a given environment through interaction.
Given these definitions, why can't evolution act on nonliving systems?
he is part of the ID crew.
According to this article:
http://cgc.rncan.gc.ca/dir/index_e.php?id=14970&_h=bleeker
He went to the "Free University of Amsterdam".
A theology school.
http://www.godgeleerdheid.vu.nl/english/index.cfm
I can get a Phd in Theology in 5 minutes on the internet, and yes it would qualify as a 'Doctorate'. Because, you know, religion always gets a special pass.
Maybe I misread, or miss interpreted some information...I certianly hope so.
I did notice he offers no falsifiable tests or evidence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Minerals are just like any other chemical species on earth. They react with one another, and form into new and more diverse populations based on a variety of fundamental thermodynamic factors. Since the earth's processes have changed and evolved since planetary accretion, it only makes since that the assemblages of minerals we see on the earth would evolve in much the same way.
It appears that this paper focuses primarily on the biological effects on mineral speciation, but there have been a variety of geologic affects that have had equally profound impacts on the earths mineralogy (which in turns defines the variety of rocks we see). Factors such as the development of the earths core, mantle, and crust, plate tectonics, the development and evolution of our atmosphere and hydrosphere, and then of course the evolution of biota and related biogenic sedimentary rocks are all going to have an effect on the mineralogic evolution of the earth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but, I thought it was the idea of sedimentary rocks that first gave real proof that the earth itself was a static thing.
Early geologists began to make great arguments that huge processes created a dynamic planet, and that really opened up the can of worms. If the planet changed, and change slowly, a naturalist might ask, then, wouldn't living organisms breed themselves in different directions in response to that? Animals have changed as a result of breeding by humans, and so what if nature had a similar hand?
This is my sig.
*
Scientists are still unsure whether the common European Swallow has a sufficient airspeed velocity to assist in coconut migration.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
In the sub-discipline of igneous petrology, geologists have long been using the term 'evolve' to describe how melt mineral compositions change with time. In this usage 'evolve' refers to a predictable series of reactions that occur according to rules defined by thermodynamics and chemistry (redundancy intended). Pressure, temperature and chemistry define the 'evolution', there are no 'mutations', just reactions according to the varying conditions.
In fact, this study isn't particularly paradigm shifting, they're confirming what has long been expected: that the composition of the elements that make up the Earth has shifted from being contained predominantly in one kind of rock to another different kind of rock over time (as planetary conditions changed). Not surprisingly, biological processes have aided in this shift.
It's the fact that we're generally used to thinking of the term 'evolve' in much more controversial settings that's got everyone hot and bothered, but sorry to disappoint; like everything else in geology, this is pretty dull.
Evolving ROCKS, 'cuz knowledge is power!
Crude way of putting it. One organism's waste is another's food. All soil has seen the interior of an organism and so have many of the hard rocks in the top six miles of crust.
Indeed, why would someone waste all their mod points marking jokes as offtopic? Is it one geologist who has no sense of humor and wants a very serious academic discussion about the evolution of rocks... on the interblarg?
This whole article is off topic anyway. The article points out the obvious: that it's not "evolution" in the same sense as Darwin. Pointing that out though doesn't make it a non issue, it begs the question "Why then are you using the word EVOLUTION?"
The answer seems to be "to make the correlation between biological evolution and this rock change seem more relevant and interesting than it would be otherwise." Not sure if it's the journalist or the scientist at fault here. But this appears to me, a non-geologist, to simply point out that humans and rocks have changed.
Isn't that kind of a given? We know that cyanobacteria changed the atmosphere earlier in the earths history, to carbon, which would presumably be changing the surface rocks. We also know that plates have continued drifting, volcanic eruptions, and meteor impacts likewise have global effects on geology, and of course local effects like glacier movement and differing pressures cause different minerals to form. And carbon dating, which I admit I don't fully understand, seems to be a pretty obvious indication of "earth" materials changing over a human-species time scale.
It seems like this "study" merely is suggesting that minerals change a little bit faster than we usually think of them changing. That would be more noteworthy if it were a central tenant of geology that mineral composition has not changed since humans have been around, but that doesn't seem to be an assumption at all.
Just like a Fire Rock for an Eevee to evolve into a Flareon?
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
I'm sorry, I must have read this wrong. I was hoping it was an article on how amazingly awesome evolution is...
Then why tout it as "evolution"? Don't we have enough trouble keeping the creationism-ist-tites at bay?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
This week's Quirks and Quarks http://www.cbc.ca/quirks has a feature on several different theories of abiogenesis, from ideas of life beginning around geothermal vents to hypotheses about life beginning in ice.
Actually, a lot of the Earth's surface ended up as the Moon. But TFA is about what happened later.
... therefore I am erodin"
ROCK LOST
did anyone else see this as a verb? i.e. (DUDE,) EVOLVING ROCKS!
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
As if we don't have enough problems with people misunderstanding and quote mining about evolution without bringing rock evolution into it...
Brace for more creationist idiots.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Get fucked, AC. I'm sick of seeing your links.
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
I left out the reference to Darwin, as I didn't want to inadvertently get another troll on this... but, Darwin actually called himself a Geologist and studied geology himself. Some of his ideas about evolution had antecedents in his father's staunch uniformitarianism.
http://www.shropshire.gov.uk/planning.nsf/viewAttachments/GFRH-7KLC73/$file/charles-darwin-and-geology.pdf
and,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
This is my sig.
Why should we redefine-ed-ing English words just to please-ed-ure the creationism-ist-tites?
You see, when a mummy rock and a daddy rock love each other very much, they get really close and hug really tight and evolve little baby pebbles.
that's right.. Without anything to do with creationism, I think the term "evolution" is usually considered something that living things do.
Better terms would be, "mineral morphology", or "changes in earth rock composition"
...with stories like this...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
We're talking about planets. Obviously the Dwayne you mean is the smaller, somewhat less sturdy Dwayne Dibley.
I welcome the discovery of Earths prior silicon based lifeforms.
Geodude evolves into Graveler, which then again evolves into Golem when traded and so on .. humm ? Well documented facts.
GeoKone.NET
Im sure many have seen this, but its Thanksgiving and I only halfass RTFA, didnt read many comments, but still think its worth a mention...
Das Rad is an excellent (short) animated film about, you guessed it, rocks. Its darn funny, and YouTube has a copy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fp5hbwdW3E
Enjoy.
Dude, that's sick. I'm ok with gay marriage, but I draw the line at dogs and logical units.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.