User:Greeshma Columbus/Sandbox

Why plants evolved to be green?
Well the first thing that comes to our mind when we think about this question is of course,the biochemical answer. Absorbance vs wavelength,     Leaves in Autumn

Surely it would be even more beneficial for plants to be black instead of red or green, from an energy absorption point of view. And Solar cells are indeed pretty dark. Scientifically wouldn't that have involved higher energy absorption as the green light is the most abundant region in the visible light spectra and thus reflect out darker colours. This is such a puzzling question and I think evolution is the best answer for it.

Technically a black plant can absorb more radiation, and this could be very useful, if extra heat produced is effectively disposed of (e.g., some plants must close their openings, called stomata, on hot days to avoid losing too much water, which leaves only conduction, convection, and radiative heat-loss as solutions). The question becomes why the only light-absorbing molecule used for power in plants is green and not simply black?

The biologist John Berman has offered the opinion that evolution is not simply an engineering process, and so it is often subject to various limitations that an engineer or other designer is not. Even if black leaves were better, evolution's limitations can prevent species from climbing to the absolute highest peak on the fitness landscape. Berman wrote that achieving pigments that work better than chlorophyll could be very difficult. In fact, all higher plants (embryophytes) are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor that is a sort of green algae – with the idea being that chlorophyll has evolved only once. Thus this would show that rather than developing a new pigment that shows higher efficient absorption of light radiation and thus more generation of energy it was easier to simply modify the existing pigment as the years passed by.