Unintelligent Design - Finding a Way to Improve on The Designer's Shoddy Design

Unintelligent Design

Finding a Way to Improve on The Designer's Shoddy Design

Credit: Tomi Baikie

Credit: Robin Horton

Photosynthesis ‘hack’ could lead to new ways of generating renewable energy

The thing about an omniscience, omnipotent designer is that everything it designs should be perfect for the purpose for which it was designed. That means it should be maximally efficient, minimally complex and incapable of improvement.

This wouldn’t be true of something 'designed' by a natural, utilitarian process operating without a plan, of course, because even a suboptimal solution could be more successful than its predecessor, and that's the only test applied by the natural selection process.

The upshot is that, if the 'design' can be improved in any way, it can't have been designed by an omniscient, omnipotent designer.

So, if they understand it and can't dismiss it, Creationists should be acutely embarrassed by news that an international team of physicists, chemists and biologists, led by the University of Cambridge, UK, are close to doing just that with one of the fundamental processes necessary for almost all life on Earth - photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis

As explained in the Cambridge University news release:

Researchers have ‘hacked’ the earliest stages of photosynthesis, the natural machine that powers the vast majority of life on Earth, and discovered new ways to extract energy from the process, a finding that could lead to new ways of generating clean fuel and renewable energy.

An international team of physicists, chemists and biologists, led by the University of Cambridge, was able to study photosynthesis – the process by which plants, algae and some bacteria convert sunlight into energy – in live cells at an ultrafast timescale: a millionth of a millionth of a second.

Despite the fact that it is one of the most well-known and well-studied processes on Earth, the researchers found that photosynthesis still has secrets to tell. Using ultrafast spectroscopic techniques to study the movement of energy, the researchers found the chemicals that can extract electrons from the molecular structures responsible for photosynthesis do so at the initial stages, rather than much later, as was previously thought.

This ‘rewiring’ of photosynthesis could improve how it deals with excess energy, and create new and more efficient ways of using its power. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

While photosynthesis is a natural process, scientists have also been studying how it could be used to help address the climate crisis, by mimicking photosynthetic processes to generate clean fuels from sunlight and water, for example.

Credit: Mairi Eyres

Zhang and her colleagues were originally trying to understand why a ring-shaped molecule called a quinone is able to ‘steal’ electrons from photosynthesis. Quinones are common in nature and can accept and give away electrons easily. The researchers used a technique called ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy to study how the quinones behave in photosynthetic cyanobacteria.

We didn’t know as much about photosynthesis as we thought we did, and the new electron transfer pathway we found here is completely surprising.

No one had properly studied how this molecule interplays with photosynthetic machinery at such an early point of photosynthesis: we thought we were just using a new technique to confirm what we already knew. Instead, we found a whole new pathway, and opened the black box of photosynthesis a bit further.

Many scientists have tried to extract electrons from an earlier point in photosynthesis, but said it wasn’t possible because the energy is so buried in the protein scaffold. The fact that we can steal them at an earlier process is mind-blowing. At first, we thought we’d made a mistake: it took a while for us to convince ourselves that we’d done it.

Dr Jenny Z. Zhang, co-corresponding author
Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Using ultrafast spectroscopy to watch the electrons, the researchers found that the protein scaffold where the initial chemical reactions of photosynthesis take place is ‘leaky,’ allowing electrons to escape. This leakiness could help plants protect themselves from damage from bright or rapidly changing light.

The physics of photosynthesis is seriously impressive. Normally, we work on highly ordered materials, but observing charge transport through cells opens up remarkable opportunities for new discoveries on how nature operates.

Dr Tomi K. Baikie, co-first author
Cavendish Laboratory
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Now at the University of Turku, Finland.

The researchers say that being able to extract charges at an earlier point in the process of photosynthesis, could make the process more efficient when manipulating photosynthetic pathways to generate clean fuels from the Sun. In addition, the ability to regulate photosynthesis could mean that crops could be made more able to tolerate intense sunlight.

Since the electrons from photosynthesis are dispersed through the whole system, that means we can access them. The fact that we didn’t know this pathway existed is exciting because we could be able to harness it to extract more energy for renewables.

Dr Laura T. Wey, co-first author
Department of Biochemistry
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The use of these ultrafast methods has allowed us to understand more about the early events in photosynthesis, on which life on Earth depends.

Professor Christopher J. Howe, co-author.
Department of Biochemistry
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Key to the discovery was the use of ultrafast spectroscopy, which allowed the researchers to follow the flow of energy in the living photosynthetic cells on a femtosecond scale – a thousandth of a trillionth of a second.

Although the team's research is behind a paywall, the abstract is available here.

Abstract

Photosystems II and I (PSII, PSI) are the reaction centre-containing complexes driving the light reactions of photosynthesis; PSII performs light-driven water oxidation and PSI further photo-energizes harvested electrons. The impressive efficiencies of the photosystems have motivated extensive biological, artificial and biohybrid approaches to ‘re-wire’ photosynthesis for higher biomass-conversion efficiencies and new reaction pathways, such as H₂ evolution or CO₂ fixation^1,2. Previous approaches focused on charge extraction at terminal electron acceptors of the photosystems³. Electron extraction at earlier steps, perhaps immediately from photoexcited reaction centres, would enable greater thermodynamic gains; however, this was believed impossible with reaction centres buried at least 4 nm within the photosystems^4,5. Here, we demonstrate, using in vivo ultrafast transient absorption (TA) spectroscopy, extraction of electrons directly from photoexcited PSI and PSII at early points (several picoseconds post-photo-excitation) with live cyanobacterial cells or isolated photosystems, and exogenous electron mediators such as 2,6-dichloro-1,4-benzoquinone (DCBQ) and methyl viologen. We postulate that these mediators oxidize peripheral chlorophyll pigments participating in highly delocalized charge-transfer states after initial photo-excitation. Our results challenge previous models that the photoexcited reaction centres are insulated within the photosystem protein scaffold, opening new avenues to study and re-wire photosynthesis for biotechnologies and semi-artificial photosynthesis.

Baikie, Tomi K.; Wey, Laura T.; Lawrence, Joshua M.; Medipally, Hitesh; Reisner, Erwin; Nowaczyk, Marc M.; Friend, Richard H.; Howe, Christopher J.; Schnedermann, Christoph; Rao, Akshay; Zhang, Jenny Z.
Photosynthesis re-wired on the pico-second timescale
Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05763-9

© 2023 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

There are very many more biochemical pathways and processes to be found in nature that, on close inspection, are found to be suboptimal and the result of a utilitarian, unplanned process, which gives the lie to claims that they are intelligently designed. It's a curious thing that leaders of the Creationist cult would prefer us to believe, as with the evidence of malevolence in parasitism, that we see their putative designer as an incompetent fool with no plan and no foresight, rather than accept that the 'designer' is a natural, utilitarian process with no plan and no direction and no magic designer.

As always, they would rather we just believe that their putative god exists rather than ask why, on close inspection, the world look as though there isn't one.

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