On Saturday, November 15, 2014 8:22:37 PM UTC, Brent wrote: > > On 11/15/2014 10:25 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 5:50 PM, <[email protected] <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%. > > > Or even not so exotic solar-thermal power stations which can reach 48%. > > > Yes but... > > 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. > > Actually this is invalid. Grounds being very logical and very standard. But context being very hard to parse in logic. More familiar contexts are resolved with linguistic supports, such as common-expressions like clichés can be. "apples and pears", "all else being equal" / "all else here not being equal", arbitrary terms of reference, cherry picking. Basically a selection is made from the life domain, effectively on arbitrary terms. A selection is made from human domain effectively on arbitrary terms; and a comparison follows that is therefore also on arbitrary terms. And the value of that old boy is arbitrarily settled, in this case probably in a cloud of commonly shared vaguely uninterested distraction. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
