For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intertwined evolution of minerals and life on Earth.
The cabinets of curiosities assembled by Renaissance-era natural philosophers proudly displayed carefully arranged samples of minerals alongside biological and human-made artifacts. In recent centuries, mineralogy has lost its luster: useful for mining, oil exploration, and as a building block of geology, but relegated to last place in the classic game show query, “Is it animal, vegetable … or mineral?”
But there would be no animals or vegetables without minerals. This is true in terms of what’s inside them (no elephants without hydroxyapatite; no onions without calcium oxalate), but also in terms of how life itself began, in the mineral-rich environment of early Earth. If early life depended on mineral diversity, though, it has more than returned the favor. A newly released database of all known minerals, organized by their chemistry, crystal structure, and the way they originated reveals that more than one third of the minerals on Earth could not have formed without biological processes. This has implications both for how we understand Earth’s interwoven biological and geochemical history, and for how we might look for — and know when we have found — evidence of life on other planets.