Plant Leaves Don’t Just Absorb Sunlight, They Scatter the Light in Just the Right Way

If you know anything about photosynthesis you know it is incredibly complicated. It uses molecular solar panels to capture the energy in sunlight, in order to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and hydrocarbons. What you may not know is that plant leaves, which support photosynthesis, are also very complicated. One problem is that when sunlight illuminates a leaf there is more light than can be used. But the dense chlorophyll pigment absorbs much of the light and so at lower levels there is insufficient sunlight. New research is elucidating how this feast or famine problem is smoothed out in some plant leaves with specs of calcium carbonate, called cystoliths, in the right size and distribution to scatter the incoming light:

light scattered by the cystoliths is distributed from the photosynthetically inefficient upper tissue to the efficient, but light deprived, lower tissue. The results prove that the presence of light scatterers reduces the steep light gradient, thus enabling the leaf to use the incoming light flux more efficiently.

This lower tissue accomplishes about half of the leaf’s carbon fixation, so the cystoliths are performing a crucial function within the plant. So random mutations just happened to produce the machinery to produce the cystoliths, and then to distribute them in the right way. Evolutionists don’t know how this could have happened, but they are certain it did happen.