On Saturday, November 15, 2014 6:25:37 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 5:50 PM, <zib...@gmail.com <javascript:>> wrote: > > >> > photosynthesis in this universe always finds the most efficient >> path where there are many others. >> > > That is incorrect. Using natural sunlight the maximum theoretical > efficiency in turning water and CO2 into glucose and free oxygen > (photosynthesis) is 11%. For real plants the specific biochemical steps > used varies according to species and so the efficiency ranges from 3 to 6%, > nowhere near the maximum. But this shouldn't be surprising, Evolution never > finds the perfect solution to a problem because it doesn't need to, it just > needs to find a solution that's better than the competition. > > By the way, typical solar cells are about 20% efficient, and some very > exotic (and very expensive) ones can reach 40%. Which just goes to show > that human intelligent design beats the hell out of random mutation and > natural selection even though it had 4 billion years to work on the problem > and we've only been working on it for a decade or two. >
p.s. This much I vaguely had the measure of. But the efficiency of the whole cell is not the context. It's the individual event. > > John K Clark > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
