Posts Tagged ‘paradigm shift’
“A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts”*…
Nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands in the coming decade, as boomers’ art collections get passed down. There won’t be enough buyers or museums to absorb it all. Felix Salmon on what inter-generational transfer may mean for the art world…
… The baby boomers spent money at an astonishing rate. In the single year of 2005, US boomers spent $7 trillion in 2026 dollars, per McKinsey. Twenty years earlier, in 1985, their predecessors in the Silent Generation had spent just $3 trillion in today’s dollars. Spending on art accelerated as the rich got richer, moved into ever-larger houses and became eager to splash out on discretionary purchases.
That unprecedented demand for art created an unprecedented supply of it too. “The art world became professionalized during the lifetime of the boomers,” notes Michael Darling, a co-founder of Museum Exchange, a company that tries to find museums willing to accept donors’ art. The number of artists making a living from their work reached previously unthinkable levels, with a concomitant increase in the number of galleries. There were about 150 art galleries in New York in 1946, per a 2005 Rand report. That doubled by 1961 and then doubled again by the early 2000s. In Los Angeles, the number of galleries went from almost zero in 1957 to more than 400 in 2005.
When patrons were limited to a few royal courts and religious institutions, the number of people who could make a living by producing art was relatively low. The boomers, blessed with vastly greater numbers, turned their money into battalions of collectable artists. In 1988 the Artnet Price Database, which tracks artists sold at auction, included 8,300 artists, including substantially all the Old Masters. By 2012 there were 90,275.
When you inherit art that was expensive when acquired, it’s difficult to think of it as “stuff” that could be thrown away or given to a thrift store. At the same time, storing and figuring out what to do with it can be enormously challenging. One way of making sure someone appreciates the art is to sell it. But finding buyers can be extraordinarily difficult. Most artists get forgotten over time. Even living artists have a hard time selling their work. A dead artist… needs a dealer who’s committed to resuscitating interest in them — and those dealers are few and far between, since it’s nearly always easier to sell the work of a living artist than a dead one.
Just looking at items that can be sold for cash on the secondary market, which is a tiny minority of all the art out there, roughly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands just in the next 10 years, per Deloitte. No one is ready. The great wealth transfer includes a vast quantity of paintings and sculptures. A small proportion of it will have some sentimental value and be kept for that reason, but most of it is going to get moved out one way or another — sold, donated or even trashed…
[Salmon explores the options: continued stewardship by the heirs, sale (through auction houses or galleries), or donation (to museums)– all of which are, as he explains, fraught. But perhaps the biggest problem is the evolution of taste…]
… An even bigger barrier for inheritors looking to pass on a collection is the way tastes change over time. Boomers grew up looking at artists like Carl Andre or Balthus, congratulating themselves on how daringly receptive they were to the shattering of historical norms; as those norms get rebuilt, younger art lovers are much more likely to find reasons to avoid showing them entirely. Instead, their collections feature more women artists and tend to be more diverse in many other ways too.
The art world doesn’t fixate on the ultra-new in the way Hollywood or pop music does, where most consumption is of products produced and released in the past year or less. All the same, galleries overwhelmingly show new work by living artists, so that’s what most art collectors end up buying. That means heirs often end up inheriting work that used to be new and exciting but today is often little more than a faint memory.
The rise and fall of artists and artistic reputations is the subject of the emerging discipline of cultural evolution. Just as Darwinian evolution selects for species that do the best at surviving, artistic evolution selects for works that continue to attract our attention. Oleg Sobchuk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, explains that art disappears from our collective memory first quickly and then slowly, in a process known as bi-exponential decay. “Sometimes we think about art as speaking to something that makes us human, that it’s general and timeless,” he says. “But in most cases, art is about something that is happening at that period of time.” The further we get away from the moment an artwork is made, the less of our attention it can generally command.
In paleontology there’s the concept of the “turnover pulse,” where the rate of extinction rises sharply; it’s not dissimilar to the theory of the paradigm shift in the history of science. In art, it’s been more than a century since the modernist revolution that started with impressionism and continued through Picasso and Duchamp. Now, for the first time, the dominant collectors and curators — not to mention artists — will be people who grew up in the age of the internet.
“Every new media, when it appears, creates some kind of rupture,” Sobchuk says. “Usually it functions as a revolution. The culture was in the hands of a small number of powerful individuals, and then from time to time, you have a technological revolution.” That doesn’t mean digital art will displace painting and sculpture. But it probably means there’s less appetite and reverence for modernism. Which doesn’t bode well for those inheriting a lot of it…
[Salmon explains why, though this transfer is essentially inevitable, it will unfold more slowly than we might think (TLDR: “Because there will still be many boomer buyers for every collector planning ahead and unwinding a collection, there won’t be nearly as much of a supply-and-demand mismatch over the next decade as the broader generational shift might imply…”) He concludes…]
… The great art transfer is a much bigger deal than “what are we going to do with all this stuff.” The art we keep will stay in the canon; the art we discard will be lost to history. All the same, the stuff question is becoming urgent, and its answer is sad, if simple: A tiny proportion of the art we inherit will be treasured and valued, and a little bit more will find a good home elsewhere, perhaps slowly accumulating historical value even if it continues to lose cultural cachet. But most of it will probably acquire signs of physical deterioration and neglect — bumps and scratches and sunbleaching… All artists are mortal, after all, and only a minuscule fraction of them achieves immortality through their work. The rest are bound to fade away, sooner or later.
Ars longa? “Boomers Are Leaving Behind More Art Than Anyone Wants,” (or here), from @felixsalmon.com in @bloomberg.com.
Also worth following: the series in e-flux on the relationship between contemporary art, real estate, housing, gentrification, and the material conditions of artists’ lives. Revisiting earlier pieces, it begins with “Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I,” from Martha Rossler.
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As we contemplate the canon, we might send birthday greetings to two artists whose places in the firmament seem, at least so far, secure:
Diego Velázquez was baptized on this date in 1599. A Baroque master of the Spanish Golden Age and leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, he is generally considered one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art.
Andrew Warhola was born on this date in 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. Better known as Andy Warhol, he was a leading figure in the Pop art movement; his work (painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art) challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture and provoked us to think more clearly about the relationship of reference and referent. Widely considered the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, he was a role model for a generation of post-modernist artists.
“In science, it happens every few years that something that was previously considered a mistake suddenly reverses all views, or that an inconspicuous and despised idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought.”*…
Today’s post is, in essence, the recommendation of the current issue of of a publication referenced here often, Noema. It’s editor, Nathan Gardels, previews its contents…
When a concept that organizes our reality is replaced by an entirely different and incommensurate worldview, it is called a “paradigm shift.”
The theme of this edition of Noema was conceived in early 2024. At that time, we had in mind the epochal shift from the paradigm of globalization, in which markets, trade and technology cross borders, to “the Planetary,” where we recognize that the whole Earth system embeds and entangles human civilization in its habitat.
This deeper awareness has been enabled by the emergence of a technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation that expands the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world, repositioning our place in the natural order. Neither above nor apart from nature, we have now come to realize we are part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.
The disclosure of climate change as a destabilizing consequence of human endeavor was enabled in the first place by planetary-scale computation. This capacity holds out the evolutionary prospect that human, machine and Earth intelligence might one day merge into a kind of planetary sapience that restores and maintains the ecological balance.
As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation would entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics. This new condition calls not for the old “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nation-states against each other but for a “Gaiapolitik” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.
As logically compelling as this case for planetary realism may be, the paradigm shift underway is going in the opposite direction. Instead of the global interconnectivity forged in recent decades maturing into a planetary perspective, it is breaking up into a renewed nationalism more emphatically sovereigntist than before the advent of globalization.
In short, the prevailing political temperament around the world today is out of sync with the planetary imperative. This does not diminish its reality but, for the moment, eclipses and derails its emergence as the conscious organizing principle of human civilization.
The paradigm shift we are witnessing today not only marks a move away from a planetary awareness but also signals the last sigh of liberal universalism as the dominant governing philosophy of the postwar order since 1945.
The rules-based liberal international order, underwritten and guaranteed for decades by American might, has been consigned to the ash can of history by the summary defection of its founding architect from its terms and premises.
Under President Donald Trump and his allies, America has effectively joined the revisionist powers of China and Russia by baldly asserting sovereigntist self-interest unencumbered by rules that also encompass the interests of others.
Tariff walls, outright trade wars and unraveling alliances are supplanting the expansive web of global commerce, Western unity and cultural cross-fertilization that characterized times only recently. In a further break from the established order, Team Trump openly contemplates its own Anschluss of other people’s territory in Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada, instead of expressing outrage at China’s desire to take Taiwan, Russia’s bloody attempt to seize Ukraine or Israel’s increasing occupation of the Palestinian territories.
As Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson discuss in a collage of commentary in this Noema edition, these developments portend the return to a world not unlike that of the 19th century, when the great powers carved out exclusive domains of influence.
The obvious great powers that would constitute a world apportioned in this way are China and Russia, both grasping at Eurasia, plus the United States and India. Whether Europe falls within the American sphere of influence depends on its capacity to cohere as a continental entity and find its identity as an alternative within a West that is fracturing under the strain of America’s revisionist turn.
Since the future appears to be taking us back to the 19th century, one cannot say we are in “uncharted territory.” On the contrary, we’ve been down this path before and know how it led to world wars that the global rules-based order, for all its well-known faults, was meant to avoid repeating.
On the American home front, and increasingly elsewhere in the West, it appears the “strong gods” of family, faith and nation are prevailing over the culturally liberal sentiments of an open society.
When there is no common agreement on what constitutes the good life, culture is politicized. As Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Noema, who gets to define “the good life” has become the central political question of our time. As in China, Russia, Iran or Turkey, governing authorities in the West are increasingly seeking to assign the moral substance of their vision to the state in place of the neutral proceduralism of liberal regimes that, at least in theory, embrace the diversity of all values without favor.
As the ascendant traditionalists see it, this rights-based liberalism grants a kind of converse moral substance to the state by virtue of the permissive openness it invites, nourishes and protects.
In many ways, liberalism was bound to fail just as Marxism did, and for the same reason. Marxism lacked a theory of politics that accommodated diverse constituencies because it assumed the universality of the interests of one class. Similarly, liberalism has falsely assumed its own universality, believing that there can be a consensus on only one conception of “the good life.” In reality, where some see declaring gender identity as the positive freedom to pursue self-realization, others see it as the corrosion of traditional Christian morality.
Like the British philosopher John Gray, Lefebvre suggests that the liberalism of the future may well entail a constitutionally grounded “modus vivendi” of autonomous jurisdictions as one way to keep the civil peace in diverse societies.
What is stunning in this context is how rapidly the America that elected Trump has tilted toward illiberal democracy under his tumultuous reign. Team Trump has robustly pursued retribution against political enemies, scorned universities as “the enemy,” moved to dismantle the administrative state and climate policies, demeaned the judicial system and cultivated crony corruption. Moreover, in the Orwellian name of free speech, Trump insists on ideological conformity across the board, from college students to corporate law firms.
To base the idea of democracy solely on elections invites this kind of illiberalism because it implies that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary for legitimacy. But, as the American founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally. That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a liberal polity.
In constitutional theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the negative that makes the Constitution and the “positive” that makes government. One is the power of acting, the other the power of amending or arresting action. The two combined make a constitutional government.
It is this governing arrangement that made America great. The biggest danger of Making America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien régime to keep the masses down.
In Niall Ferguson’s contribution to Noema, the historian raises the specter that “history was always against any republic lasting 250 years. This republic is in its late republican phase, with the intimations of empire much more visible.”…
… As politicized cultural battles and the churning geopolitical economy further unfold, a paradigm shift of a significance similar to planetary awareness is taking place that will redefine what it means to be human.
Across the sciences, we are coming to understand the self-organizing principle of “computation” as the building block of all forms of budding intelligence, from primitive cells to generative AI. This process involves learning from the environment, assembling information and arranging it by sharing functional instructions through “copying and pasting” code, so that an organism can develop, reproduce and sustain itself.
As Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika write in this issue, “computing existed in nature long before we built the first ‘artificial computers.’ … Understanding computing as a natural phenomenon will enable fundamental advances not only in computer science and AI, but also in physics and biology.”
More than half a century ago, they note, pioneering computer scientists had the intuition that organic and inorganic intelligence follow the same set of rules for development. “John von Neumann,” write the authors, “realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing those instructions.” The technical requirements for that “universal constructor” in nature — the tape-like instructions of DNA — “correspond precisely to the technical requirements for the earliest computers.”
“Life,” they continue, “is computational because its existence over time depends on growth, healing or reproduction, and computation itself must evolve to support these essential functions.”
Grasping the correspondence with natural computation and learning from it, they believe, will render AI “brainlike” as it further evolves along the path from mimicking neural computation to predictive intelligence, general intelligence and, ultimately, collective intelligence. “Brains, AI agents and societies can all become more capable through increased scale. However, size alone is not enough. Intelligence is fundamentally social, powered by cooperation and the division of labor among many agents.”
In short, as philosopher of technology Tobias Rees also argues in this issue, the evolution of computation as a symbiosis of human and machine will cause us to rethink what it means to be human as, for the first time in history, a “more than human” intelligence emerges on our planet.
These contradictions and crosscurrents of the profound paradigm shifts we are living through all at once mark what future historians will surely describe as the Age of Upheaval…
FWIW, I worry that the diagnosis of our current political/cultural morass is maybe not dark enough. And as to AI, I’m no wide-eyed believer in the current cycle of hype. Indeed, I worry that AI could contribute to our social ills in the short term both by increasing and amplying the atomization and misinformation that we suffer and by challenging the economy if, as seems all too plausible, current over-enthusisam/over investment occasions a crash. That said, I honor the wisdom of Roy Amara: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
In any case, every link above is eminently worth clicking/reading; better yet, buy the issue.
All change: “Paradigm Shifts,” from @noemamag.com.
[Image above: source]
* Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
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As we buckle up, we might recall that it was on ths date in 1944 that IBM dedicated the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I)– one of the earliest, if not the earliest, general-purpose electromechanical computers, and the one that laibd the base for subsequent development… and thus a catalyst for the string of developments– technical, social, and political with which we’re wrestling now.
Designer Howard Aiken had enlisted IBM as a partner in 1937; company chairman Thomas Watson Sr. personally approved the project and its funding. On completion it was put to work on a set war-related tasks, including calculations– overseen by John von Neumann— for the Manhattan Project.
The Mark I was the industry’s largest electromechanical calculator… and it was large: 51 feet long, 8 feet high, and 2 feet deep; it weighed about 9,445 pounds The basic calculating units had to be synchronized and powered mechanically, so they were operated by a 50-foot (15 m) drive shaft coupled to a 5 horsepower electric motor, which served as the main power source and system clock. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second; a multiplication took 6 seconds; a division took 15.3 seconds; and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over a minute… ridiculously slow by today’s standards, but a huge advance in its time.
“We all live in each other’s shadow”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…
Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.
As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.
Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…
[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]
… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.
The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.
The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.
In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.
The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.
The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…
A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.
* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin
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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.
“There is often a decades-long time lag between the development of powerful new technologies and their widespread deployment”*…
Jerry Neumann explores the relevance of Carlota Perez‘s thinking (her concept of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and theory of great surges, which built on Schumpeter’s work on Kondratieff waves) to the socio-economic moment in which we find ourselves…
I’ve been in the technology business for more than thirty years and for most of that time it’s felt like constant change. Is this the way innovation progresses, a never-ending stream of new things?
If you look at the history of technological innovation over the course of decades or centuries, not just years, it looks completely different. It looks like innovation comes in waves: great surges of technological development followed by quieter periods of adaptation.
The past 240 years have seen four of these great surges and the first half of a fifth…
Economist Carlota Perez in her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital puts forward a theory that addresses the causes of these successive cycles and tries to explain why each cycle has a similar trajectory of growth and crisis. Her answers lie not just in technological change, but in the social, institutional, and financial aspects of our society itself…
Perez’ theory divides each cycle into two main parts: the installation period and the deployment period. Installation is from irruption to the crisis, and deployment is after the crisis. These are the ying and the yang of the cycle. Some of the differences between the two periods we’ve already mentioned—creative destruction vs. creative construction, financial capital vs. production capital, the battle of the new paradigm with the old vs. acceptance of the new TEP, etc…
We like theory because it tells us why, but more than that, a good theory is predictive. If Perez’ theory is correct, it should allow us to predict what will happen next in the current technological cycle…
A crisp distillation of Perez’s thinking and a provocative consideration of its possible meaning for our times: “The Age of Deployment,” from @ganeumann.
* Carlota Perez (@CarlotaPrzPerez)
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As we ride the waves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901, 11 years after the suicide of Vincent Van Gogh (and as his vision and its impact flowered in its “Deployment Age”) a large retrospective of his work (71 paintings) was held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. It captured the excitement of André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck— and thus contributed to the emergence of Fauvism.
“Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too.”*…
There are many more varieties of minerals on earth than previously believed– and about half of them formed as parts or byproducts of living things…
The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.
A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history—and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.
In a pair of papers published on July 1, 2022 in American Mineralogist, researchers Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison and their collaborators outline a new taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on precisely how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life influence each other.
Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That’s almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral “species” in the classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which focuses strictly on a mineral’s crystalline structure and chemical makeup.
…
Morrison and Hazen also identified 57 processes that individually or in combination created all known minerals. These processes included various types of weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformation inside the mantle, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, massive impacts during Earth’s formation, and even condensations in interstellar space before the planet formed. They confirmed that the biggest single factor in mineral diversity on Earth is water, which through a variety of chemical and physical processes helps to generate more than 80 percent of minerals.
But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.
But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.
Historically, scientists “have artificially drawn a line between what is geochemistry and what is biochemistry,” said Nita Sahai, a biomineralization specialist at the University of Akron in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. In reality, the boundary between animal, vegetable, and mineral is much more fluid.
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A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too: “Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth,” from @jojofoshosho0 in @QuantaMagazine.
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As we muse on minerals, we might send systemic birthday greetings to Thomas Samuel Kuhn; he was born on this date in 1922. A physicist, historian, and philosopher of science, Kuhn believed that scientific knowledge didn’t advance in a linear, continuous way, but via periodic “paradigm shifts.” Karl Popper had approached the same territory in his development of the principle of “falsification” (to paraphrase, a theory isn’t false until it’s proven true; it’s true until it’s proven false). But while Popper worked as a logician, Kuhn worked as a historian. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made his case; and while he had– and has— his detractors, Kuhn’s work has been deeply influential in both academic and popular circles (indeed, the phrase “paradigm shift” has become an English-language staple).
“What man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see.”
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
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