Re: Colors of alien plants -- Scientific American

James A. Donald skreiv:
> 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.

Yeah. Or put differently, evolution is pretty good at finding a local 
maximum fitness, but completely sucky in finding a global maximum.

People that think that evolved creatures are anywhere close to "perfect" 
always bugs me. There are tons of design which are just plain bad, but 
which are as you say highly polished and on a local maximum, so they're 
stable.

Typical vegetation convert at best 1% of the incoming photons to usable 
energy. This compares pretty poorly with even todays crude solar-cells 
which can easily do 10% and we've got designs that in principle should 
be able to go to 30-50% (depending on your level of optimism)


	Eivind