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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
Hazen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.