minipost
It turns out they use red and blue light for photosynthesis and reflect green light. But why? That wastes an enormous amount of energy - why didn’t plants evolve to look black?
There have been any number of conjectures and they tend to be unsatisfying. Here’s something central to life on Earth and we can’t answer a simple question of efficiency. And recently Astrobiologists worry about such things as they like about lyfe (a more general form of life that has the life we know as a subset)
Recently a paper appear in Science that offers a neat hypothesis (hypotheses are much more important in science than conjectures) .. that the collectors on plants have very erratic power outputs locally .. wind blows a leaf partly away from the sun, etc. .. and the downstream biochemical processes from the initial photon conversion have serious problems with too much fluctuating energy. The investigators turned the problem into a network problem and asked the question what colors of the spectrum would be best for these noisy inputs. The answer is red and blue.
I’ve been meaning to write about it, but yesterday Pip mentioned efficiency and resiliency in a news letter. Nature is full of resilient systems that are so because, among other things, they don’t try to optimize efficiency. In biology you might not judge something resilient unless it can go thousands of life cycles. There aren’t many man made systems that can say the same. Today, going through Quanta, I found a piece on the green plant work that is much better written than anything I’d do, so enjoy!
Oh.. and the sky isn’t blue either. it’s just a mostly transparent stage upon which all the colors dance. It just turns out blue is a bit of a ham.
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