This is only tangentially related, but I have always wondered why chlorophyll absorbs blue and red, but reflects green--green being sunlight's brightest component.
It's almost as if there was some evolutionary pressure towards being very visible in sunlight which is more important than evolving ways to collect as much sun energy as possible. When I guess at this I end up with something along the lines of reflected green being used as a signal to a neighboring plant: "I'm already here, grow in some other direction instead." There is some evidence that plants do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-3040.ep1160...) but it's not clear that the need to do so is so strong that it would overshadow the drive to collect as much energy as possible.
Or perhaps there's something to do with the physics of absorbing light to drive a chemical reaction that makes it better to absorb at red and blue while passing on green (450nm and 680nm are not harmonics--so if this is the case it's more complex than which sorts of standing waves would fit in some chemical gap or other).
It's almost as if there was some evolutionary pressure towards being very visible in sunlight which is more important than evolving ways to collect as much sun energy as possible. When I guess at this I end up with something along the lines of reflected green being used as a signal to a neighboring plant: "I'm already here, grow in some other direction instead." There is some evidence that plants do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-3040.ep1160...) but it's not clear that the need to do so is so strong that it would overshadow the drive to collect as much energy as possible.
Or perhaps there's something to do with the physics of absorbing light to drive a chemical reaction that makes it better to absorb at red and blue while passing on green (450nm and 680nm are not harmonics--so if this is the case it's more complex than which sorts of standing waves would fit in some chemical gap or other).