Robert Hazen

It applies to minerals, too.

My colleagues and collaborators, philosopher Carol Cleland and mineralogists Robert Hazen and Shauna Morrison, propose that we should classify minerals by their historical nature, rather than merely their present structural and chemical properties.

Consider diamond, a simple mineral of pure carbon arranged in a tetrahedral crystal lattice.

Cleland, Hazen, and Morrison contend that diamonds formed in the cooling atmospheres of aged stars, diamonds forged under the extreme pressures and temperatures of Earth's mantle, diamonds that were shocked into existence by large meteor impacts, and diamonds manufactured in laboratories are fundamentally distinct historical natural kinds.