ArticlePNAS nexus2024
Open-ended versus bounded evolution: Mineral evolution as a case study.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Proto-Biosignatures and Planetary Geochemical Metabolism: A Thermodynamic Screening Model of Prebiotic Geochemical Organization.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Selection for Function in Early Life: Implications for Early-Onset Pathologies.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Selection for Function in Complex Distributed Pathological Systems.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Towards origins of virtual artificial life: an overview.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Reply to 'Experimental measurement of assembly indices are required to determine the threshold for life'.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To what extent are naturally evolving systems limited in their potential diversity (i.e. "bounded") versus unrestricted ("open-ended")? Minerals provide a quantitative model evolving system, with well-documented increases in mineral diversity through multiple stages of planetary evolution over billions of years. A recent framework that unifies behaviors of both biotic and abiotic evolving systems posits that all such systems are characterized by combinatorial richness subject to selection. In the case of minerals, combinatorial richness derives from the possible combinations of chemical elements coupled with permutations of their formulas' coefficients. Observed mineral species, which are selected for persistence through deep time, represent a miniscule fraction of all possible element configurations. Furthermore, this model predicts that as planetary systems evolve, stable minerals become an ever-smaller fraction of the "possibility space." A postulate is that "functional information," defined as the negative log
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