On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 03:16:31PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > > > On 6/6/2018 8:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > > > But in the early days of life on this planet random > > > mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the > > > photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it > > > works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect > > > you just have to be better than the competition. And once Evolution > > > started > > > to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became > > > virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than > > > chlorophyll. > > Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green? > > Is "It happened at random." an explanation? >
FWIW, the photosynthesis story is much more interesting. The first photosynthetic organisms absorbed light right at the peak of the Sun's spectrum (being a yellow star, that's right in the yellow-green band). As a consequence, these organisms reflected the red and blue parts of the spectrum, appearing a purplish colour. Their modern day descendents go by the name "red-blue algae", and tend to have rather poisonous consequences on modern eukaryotic life when they get out of control. Then one day, an organism discovered a different photosynthetic path based on chlorophyl. Because the oceans were covered in this purplish stuff absorbing all the green light, all that remained was the red and blue ends of the spectrum. Hence chlorophyl got optimised to absorb those frequencies, reflecting back the remainder, which is green. That is why modern plants are green, which is not an optimal colour nowadays. BTW - red-blue algae find oxygen poisonous, it was photosynthetic plants that killed off most of the red-blue algae, setting the scene for animals to arise, which depend on their oxygen waste gas. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
