I asked this same question last week and got some good answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 Thr

I asked this same question last week and got some good answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630224 Three things that stood out to me: - Terrestrial plants evolved from green algae. There are other colors of photosynthetic algae. The advantage of absorbing red and blue may have been about avoiding competition with nearby red algae (which absorbs green), and about how blue light penetrates more deeply. - The trick is not capturing as much energy as possible, but rather capturing and routing energy to the reaction centers such that it neither overshoots nor undershoots the energy necessary for the reaction. This works better with two absorption peaks instead of one (more here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...). The absorption peaks of chlorophyll are both adequately distant from one another, and also more or less centered on the visible (i.e. most energetic) spectrum emitted by the sun. - The idea that the green-yellow region of the visible spectrum is most energetic is, if not a misconception, at least more complex that it seems (https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/level-2/common-misconception https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/l...).