James A. Donald
> > My take on it was that it was full of bunkum.
Brian Davis
> How much of that was the science or reference, and how much was the
> unsubstantiated jump to "and thus plants are green"?
The science was in the article only in the sense that a runway and
wireless are in the cargo cult place of worship.
The entire article had the superficial form and appearance of science
without the actual substance. The unsubstantiated jump to "and thus
plants are green" was merely one small part of a great big pile of
cargo cult science.
> True, but some of those "inefficiencies" have been re-harnessed in
> interesting ways as well
Once evolution gets a system going, it will optimize the hell out of
it, but the actual design does not look like a design, but rather like
the random aggregation of a pile of parts in a junkyard by a tornado,
which pile of junk then gets the superficial appearance of design by
each part being carefully polished and perfectly fitted to the other
parts. Famously, the elbow joint resembles two chopsticks held
together by rubber bands, and the knee joint two chopsticks and a
pebble. Photosynthesis is more of the same.
James A. Donald:
> > The theory explaining this that I find plausible is that
> > the first photosynthesizers used hydrogen sulfide and
> > absorbed green light. The photosynthesizers at the
> > bottom were short of green light, and short of hydrogen
> > sulfide, so they used red light to synthesize a
> > substitute for hydrogen sulfide, leading eventually to
> > the two stage reaction used by today's green plants.
Brian Davis
> That does sound good, but it leads me to wonder what happened to the
> green-light photosynthesizers.
They are still around, still using hydrogen sulfide: The purple sulfur
bacteria. Because they absorb green light, they are dark purple - as
any efficient photosynthesizer should be that uses light from a sol
type sun.
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We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/
James A. Donald
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